And helping one another to do nothing;
So call'd the foreman in, and begg'd to know,

As a great favour, when they meant to go.

66

Why," quoth the honest man, scratching his nob,
"Not afore master gets another job."—

The Surgeon storm'd and swore, but took the hint,
Laid in a double stock of lint,

And to his patients at the Plough dispenses,
Week after week, new pills and plasters,
Looks very grave on their disasters,
And will not answer for the consequences,
If they presume to use their arms or feet,
Before their cure is quite complete.
No, no," he mutters, "they shall be
Served as the painters treated me;
And if my slowness they reproach,
I'll tell them they shall leave the place
The moment there's another race
Run by the Patent Safety Coach. `

ADVANTAGES OF HAVING NO HEAD!

The
very head and front of my offending
Hath this extent-nc more.

SHAKSPEARE.

I HATE the man who can never see more than one side of a question-who has but a single idea, and that perhaps a wrong one.-No; I adopt an impression zealously, perhaps erroneously, but I forget not the "audi alteram partem." I can plead my own cause; but I have not given myself a retaining fee; I am therefore open to conviction, and forward to acknow

1

ledge all that may be reasonably claimed by my op-
ponents. Candour and liberality are my motto, in
the spirit of which I begin with confessing, that there
are occasions when that bulbous excrescence termed a
head may be deemed a handy appendage. As a peg to
hang hats on-as a barber's block for supporting wigs,
or a milliner's for showing off bonnets-as a target for
shooting at when rendered conspicuous by a shining
helmet-
t-as a snuff-box or a chatter-box-as a machine
for stretching nightcaps, or fitting into a guillotine, or
for shaking when we have nothing to say: in all these
capacities it is indisputably a most useful piece of
household furniture. Yet, as far as my own experi-
ence goes, its inconveniences so fearfully predominate
over its accommodations, that if I could not have been
born a column without any capital, made compact and
comfortable by an ante-natal decollation, I would at
least have chosen to draw my first breath among

"The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders ;"-

that by carrying mine adversary in this manner, locked up as it were in mine own chest, I might keep him in as good subjection as St. Patrick did when he swam across the Liffey, and be the better enabled to stomach whatever miseries he might entail upon me.

Away with the hackneyed boast so pompously put forth by simpletons who have no pretensions to the distinction they claim for the race-that man only has a reasoning head! Tant pis pour lui. If he possess this fine privilege, he treats it as worldlings sometimes

do their fine clothes-he values it so highly that he has not the heart to use it, or show it in his conduct. His reason lies in the wardrobe of his brain till it becomes moth-eaten; or if he exert it at all, it is that it may commit a moral suicide and try to get rid of itself. Never so happy as when he can escape from this blessing, he dozes away as much of it as he can in' sleep; or blows out his highly-vaunted brains every evening with a bottle of port wine; or tells you, with a paviour's sigh, that the happiest man is the laughing lunatic, who finds his straw-crown and joint-stool throne a most delightful exchange for all the vanity and vexation of irrational reason. Now, if a man could but leave off at his neck-make his shoulders the ultima Thule of his figure-convert himself into a pollard, all this would be accomplished at once. He would not belong to either the family of the Longheads or the Wrongheads; he would be neither headstrong nor headlong; he could not be over head and ears in debt or in love; head-ach, and face-ach, and toothach, and ear-ach, would be to him as gorgons, and griffins, and harpies-imaginary horrors: opthalmick medicines he needs not; he neither runs his head into danger nor against a wall, and whether corn be high or low-rents paid or unpaid-the five per cents. reduced to four, or the three per cents. to nothing, he cares not, for there is no earthly matter about which he can trouble his head. A chartered libertine, he laughs (in his sleeve) at kings and parliaments; the wandering Jew, St. Leon, or Melmoth, were not more impassive; guillotines and new drops have for him

no more terrors than has a thumbscrew for a sprat, or tight boots for an oyster; Jack Ketch and the Headman are no more formidable to him than are the Centaurs and Amazons to us." Let the gall'd jade wince, his withers are unwrung." The happy headless rogue pays neither powder nor capitation tax. The London Tavern and the Crown and Anchor are his patrimonial kitchens, wherein he alone may reckon without his host. All ordinaries are at his mercy; he may gorge with his friends until the revel rout be dispersed by the watchmen. "The sloe-juice and ratsbane, and such kind of stuff," be it ever so villainous, can never get up into his brain; and as to the reckoning in all these cases, it is so much a-head-and what is that to him?

It may be thought that I have said enough upon this no-head, but I cannot refrain from adding, that a man thus happily truncated would possess immense advantages over his companions, should the guardians of the night break in upon his symposia as I have imagined; for he could not be tweaked by the nose, nor thrust out head and shoulders; although he might tumble down stairs without any risk of breaking his neck or fracturing his skull. During life he might play as many pranks as Yorick the king's jester, and after death no Hamlet could exclaim over his remains "Why, will he suffer this knave to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery ?"

Plato's Atlantis, and Sir Thomas More's Utopia, and Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, would all be realised

in the felicitous life of such a being as I have suggested. But methinks I hear my fair readers exclaim, What happiness is there without love, and where would such an animal find a mistress? Do we not already hear husbands often complaining that their wives have no heads, and vice versâ? Besides, might he not seek the original "good woman," of whom a decapital likeness is suspended as a public-house sign at Shoreditch, and another at Walworth, neither of which did I ever pass in my suburban rambles without many marital yearnings, and longings, and aspirations? These were the only beatific visions that ever identified the conception of the novelists and dramatists-Love at first Sight. That stump of a neck is irresistible. In the event of a marriage thus constituted, some difficulty might occur as to the responses, but it could be obviated by signs, as in the unions of our deaf and dumb; not by a nod or shake of the head indeed, but by some equally intelligible indication; and methinks I could rival Catullus himself in composing an epithalamium for such a nuptial pair, for I might safely predicate that they would never lay their heads together to hatch mischief, nor run them against one another in anger, nor lose their time in kissing, nor fall together by the ears. No fear of Bluebeards in this happy state, which, if it could be universally accomplished, would at once restore to us the Saturnia regna—the golden age—the millennium.

Envious, and timid, and jealous people, are perpetually on the watch to oppose every improvement as revolutionary innovation; and by some such I ex