A Fifth Volume of' the learned lueubrations of The Doctor
will be welcome to the lovers of scholastic trilling, where the value of the sayings is inversely proportioned to the subjects that
elicit them. We would back the Doctor at quoting, against the most voracious and oroni-lingual of readers and retentive and ready rememberers. The slightest suggestion sets his memory at work ; and, like blood from the vein at the lancet's touch, forth rushes the stream of lettered lore, in prose and verse, grave and facetious, Latin and Italian, and what not, till some cobweb of quaint fiction stops its flow.
The history of Dr. Dove and his renowned steed Nobs is but an attenuated thread of Shandean humour, on which are strung relics the most precious and the most worthless—of all sizes, shapes, and sorts, from the choice pearl of poesy and the golden bead of philosophy to the withered berry of the hermit's rosary and the pierced chuekfarthing of the town-gallant—the lowest currency of a jest. It will scarcely give an idea of the contents of the present volume to say, that in it the Doctor discourses out of the stores of the ancients and his contemporaries, interspersed with his own sober sense and sarcastic waggery—albeit he bab- bles now and then in a style of anility, like to one in his dotage— of the horse, and his qualities good and bad ; of the names men have bestowed on their pets, animate and inanimate ; of the influ- ence of man's care on brutes; of oaths and burdens of songs; of shaving and salvation ; of the whale-fishery and goose-quills; of unknown authors and the mystery of The Doctor.
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