MR. WELLER'S STORY OF THE CRUMPETS.
(To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Sra,—Without rashness your correspondent, Mr. Howard, in the Spectator of April 6th, might have distinctly charged" Boz" with conversion of "Bozzy's " muffins into crumpets and to his own use. Ejusdem farinw no doubt is the following exquisite "breakfast delicacy" by a more delicate hand [i.e., De Quincey] :—" Darwin in his Zoonomia ' reports the case of an officer holding the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel who could not tolerate a breakfast to which this odious article (the muffin) was wanting. But as a savage retribu- tion invariably supervened, within an hour or two, on this act of insane sensuality, he came to a resolution that life was intolerable with muffins though still more intolerable without muffins. He would stand the nuisance no longer; yet—being a just man—he would give Nature one final chance of reforming her dyspeptic atrocities. Muffins, therefore, being laid at one angle of the table, and loaded pistols at another, with rigid equity the Colonel awaited the result. This was pretty much as usual ; and then the poor man, incapable of retreating from his word of honour, com- mitted suicide; having previously left a line for posterity to the effect (I forget the expression) that a muffinless world was no world for him : better no life at all than a life dismantled of muffins.' " The actual tragedy probably occurred in 1776; between that date and Topbam Beauclerk's mention of it for a combatant purpose at "The Club" twenty years passed. Of its record in print in that interim no trace has been found. Erasmus Darwin's treatise was published in 1793; it was not the sort of book to be opened by young Dickens if by an improbable accident it ever came in his way. On the other hand, Boswell's book was in those days read as a matter of course by everybody who read anything at all. May we not incidentally conclude from the elaboration of the theme by De Quincey but seven years after the appearance of "Pickwick," that the Opiumtater did not know his Weller as Sam knew his London ? Competition in humorous fantasia with a contemporary would have been surely abhorrent to that delicate and dignified man of genius.—I am, Sir, Sze.,
Previous page
