her reading.  I may have undergone agonies, you see, but every man who has been bred at an English public school comes away from a private interview with Dr. Birch with a calm, even a smiling face.  And this is not impossible, when you are prepared.  You screw your courage up—­you go through the business.  You come back and take your seat on the form, showing not the least symptom of uneasiness or of previous unpleasantries.  But to be caught suddenly up, and whipped in the bosom of your family—­to sit down to breakfast, and cast your innocent eye on a paper, and find, before you are aware, that the Saturday Monitor or Black Monday Instructor has hoisted you and is laying on—­that is indeed a trial.  Or perhaps the family has looked at the dreadful paper beforehand, and weakly tries to hide it.  “Where is the Instructor, or the Monitor?” say you.  “Where is that paper?” says mamma to one of the young ladies.  Lucy hasn’t it.  Fanny hasn’t seen it.  Emily thinks that the governess has it.  At last, out it is brought, that awful paper!  Papa is amazingly tickled with the article on Thomson; thinks that show up of Johnson is very lively; and now—­heaven be good to us!—­he has come to the critique on himself:—­“Of all the rubbish which we have had from Mr. Tomkins, we do protest and vow that this last cartload is” &c.  Ah, poor Tomkins!—­but most of all, ah! poor Mrs. Tomkins, and poor Emily, and Fanny, and Lucy, who have to sit by and see paterfamilias put to the torture!

Now, on this eventful Saturday, I did not cry, because it was not so much the Editor as the Publisher of the Cornhill Magazine who was brought out for a dressing; and it is wonderful how gallantly one bears the misfortunes of one’s friends.  That a writer should be taken to task about his books, is fair, and he must abide the praise or the censure.  But that a publisher should be criticised for his dinners, and for the conversation which did not take place there,—­is this tolerable press practice, legitimate joking, or honorable warfare?  I have not the honor to know my next-door neighbor, but I make no doubt that he receives his friends at dinner; I see his wife and children pass constantly; I even know the carriages of some of the people who call upon him, and could tell their names.  Now, suppose his servants were to tell mine what the doings are next door, who comes to dinner, what is eaten and said, and I were to publish an account of these transactions in a newspaper, I could assuredly get money for the report; but ought I to write it, and what would you think of me for doing so?

And suppose, Mr. Saturday Reviewer—­you censor morum, you who pique yourself (and justly and honorably in the main) upon your character of gentleman, as well as of writer, suppose, not that you yourself invent and indite absurd twaddle about gentlemen’s private meetings and transactions, but pick this wretched garbage out of a New York street, and hold it up for your readers’ amusement—­don’t