agreed better with his [Henry’s] palate than his constitution,” a dish so indigestible, that a late novelist, at the end of his book, could imagine no more summary mode of getting rid of all his heroes and heroines than by a hearty supper of stewed lampreys. In yet another the same squib-writer has a cruel simile, “just as honest King Stephen his beaver might doff to the fishes that carried his kind uncle off.” To a surfeit of red herrings is ascribed the death of Robert Greene, the dramatist. The trap for the life of the Emperor Antoninus Pius was baited, as De Quincey expresses it, with toasted cheese. Kaiser Karl VI. was the victim of a voracious repast on mushrooms stewed in oil. When Hadrian found his illness on the increase, and his end approaching, he removed to Baiæ, where, “in spite of the prescriptions [or proscriptions?] of his physicians, he began to eat and drink according to his pleasure.” The excesses of Charles V. in the same way are exceptionally notorious. Of that “little, spare, aguish, peevish, supper-eating” sovereign, Frederick the Great, who loved his dishes the more they tormented him, it is on record, that on the approach of death, “this warrior full of courage and sage speculation,” could not resist the customary pepper and sauce piquante, though he knew it would inevitably result in a nightmare, “turning his bed into a nest of monsters.” So with the Duke Augustus commemorated by Perthes: “All medical skill was in vain, for this half crazy prince could not deny himself the stimulus of the hottest spices.” Mr. Tennyson’s dying Northern Farmer is only too true a type of his kind:— “What atta stannin’ theer for, an’ doesn bring ma the yaäle? Doctor’s a’tottler, lass, an a’s hallus i’ the owd taäle; I weänt breäk rules for doctor, a knaws naw more nor a floy; Git ma my yaäle I tell tha, an’ gin I mun doy I mun doy.”