Although some of the unhappy authors whose mangled remains strew this den of horrors seem to have attained a kind of maturity before they were cruelly torn to pieces as we now see them, by far the greater number are a sort of murdered innocents, having been strangled in their birth, or shortly after. A good many there are, too, who seem to have been dead born, or to have perished while yet in embryo. Piteous as it is to look on the heavy, sturdy corpses of the murdered prose writers that lie thickly up and down this chamber of death, yet infinitely more piteous is it to contemplate the delicate, fragile forms of the poets thus cruelly mangled and mutilated that lie no less thickly around us. Poor dear, unfledged things! What a fate has been thine!--what a destiny, to be consigned, ere ye had yet opportunity to open your little musical throats, to the tender mercies of _that_ literary Burke--that ruthless monster whom the world, thinking of him only in connection with cigars and pigtail, calls a tobacconist. Where now, sweet little humming birds, be those soft and tender notes with which ye sought, alas, how vainly! to charm the huge, rude ear of an uncouth and barbarous world that would not listen to ye? Alas, they have ceased for ever! How little does that savage, the demon of the place, mind your sweet, small voices, that give forth a piteous wail, like the last notes of the dying swan, every time he lays his merciless hands on you. Little, indeed! Let but a customer come in for half an ounce of “Blackguard,” and he will, without the smallest hesitation or compunction, seize one of you, dear unfortunates, and tear you limb from limb for his own and that customer’s conveniency: ay, for a paltry three half-pence, mayhap less--a pennyworth of “Scotch”--will he perpetrate this atrocious deed. That sanguinary bench, that horrid counter, is strewn over with your slim carcases and fragile limbs; and your murderer is hanging over your mutilated remains, laughing and chatting and joking with his customers as pleasantly and unconcernedly as if you were so much waste paper. Oh, it is atrocious! Such, then, dear reader, is the light--a terrible one, indeed, but as thou wilt acknowledge, we have no doubt, a correct one--in which we look upon snuff shops, which, as thou well knowest, have long lain, and not unjustly, under the stigma of being fatal to authors. If thou art one, pray, then, eschew it; for if thou dost once enter its dismal portals, thou wilt never, never more be heard of in this world! C. ANIMAL TAMING. SECOND AND CONCLUDING ARTICLE.