To be candid, we are puzzled by the sprightliness of our own fancy, and do not very distinctly comprehend how we have managed to involve the Regenerator, whose thoughts were bent on the pale and slim sylphs of the boudoir, in a squabble with the rubicund and rotund vestals who watch the inextinguishable flames of THE GREAT HEARTH. This marvellous dialogue, from which we have taken with our finger and thumb a tit-bit here and there, might be the text for inexhaustible annotation. It occupies no more than two pages; but, as Gibbon has said of Tacitus, "they are the pages of Soyer." Every topic within the range of human knowledge is touched, by direct exposition or collateral allusion. The metaphysician and the theologian, the physiologist and the moralist, are all challenged to investigate its dogmas, which, let us forewarn them, are so curtly, positively, and oracularly propounded, as, if orthodox, to need no commentary; and if heterodox, to demand accumulated mountains of controversy to overwhelm them. For he, we believe, can hardly be deemed a mean opponent, unworthy of a foeman's steel-pen, who has at his fingers' ends "Mullets a la Montesquieu," "Fillets of Haddock a la St Paul," "Saddle of Mutton a la Mirabeau," "Ribs of Beef a la Bolingbroke," "Pounding Souffle a la Mephistopheles," "Woodcock a la Stael," and "Filets de Boeuf farcis a la Dr Johnson." The constitution of English cookery is precisely similar to the constitution of the English language. Both were prophetically sketched by Herodotus in his description of the army of Xerxes, which gathered its numbers, and strength, and beauty, from "all the quarters in the shipman's card." That imperishable mass of noble words--that glorious tongue in which Soyer has prudently written the "Gastronomic Regenerator," is in itself an unequalled specimen of felicitous cookery. The dishes which furnished the most _recherche_ dinner Soyer ever dressed, the "Diner Lucullusian a la Sampayo," being resolved into the chaos whence they arose in faultless proportions and resistless grace, would not disclose elements and ingredients more heterogenous, remote, and altered from their primal nature, than those which go to the composition of the few sentences in which he tells us of this resuscitation of the _caena_ of Petronius. A thousand years and a thousand accidents, the deepest erudition and the keenest ingenuity, the most delicate wit and most outrageous folly, have been co-operating in the manufacture of the extraordinary vocabulary which has enabled the Regenerator himself to concoct the following unparalleled receipt for "THE CELESTIAL AND TERRESTRIAL CREAM OF GREAT BRITAIN. "Procure, if possible, the antique Vase of the Roman Capitol; the Cup of Hebe; the Strength of Hercules; and the Power of Jupiter;" "_Then proceed as follows:_--"