Note 8 — LETTER XXXIII.

Nay—with your professional information that when ice breaks you can stick it together again, you have also imaginative literature of the rarest. Here—instead of Ramsay’s Tea-table Miscellany, with its Hardiknute and other ballads of softer tendency,—some of them not the best of their kind, I admit,—here you have Mr. Knatchbull-Huguessen, M.P.’s, Tales at Tea-time,8 dedicated to the schoolroom teapot, in which the first story is of the “Pea Green Nose,” and in which (opening at random) I find it related of some Mary of our modern St. Mary’s Lochs, that “Mary stepped forward hastily, when one of the lobsters sprang forward, and seized her arm in his claw, saying, in a low, agitated tone of voice,” etc. etc.