An inspired serving-man, in a livery of industry, turned up with morality, is a species of bard which we never expected to find in the service of the Muses, or bringing a written character from his last place, and vaunting of his readiness and ability to write epics and wait at table. The work we should have looked to meet with, emanating from the butler's pantry, was a miscellaneous volume full of religious scraps, essays on dress, receipts for boot-tops, wise cooking cogitations, remedies for bugs, cures for ropy beer, hints for blacking, ingredients for punch, thoughts on tapping ale, early rising and killing fleas. The mischief of the wide dissemination of education is now becoming apparent, for, poor as authors confessedly are, they have generally been gentlemen, even in rags--learned men of some degree, though with exposed elbows--folk only a little lower than the angels! But never until the schoolmaster was so abundantly abroad, distributing his spelling-soup to the poor, did we ever hear of a butler writing poetry, and committing it to the press. The order of things is becoming reversed. The garret is beginning to lose its literary celebrity, and the kitchen is taking the matter up. A floor near the sky in Grub-street is no pen-spot now; but down fifty fathoms deep in Portland Place, or Portman Square, or some far-retired old country house, you shall find the author: his red cuffs turned up over his light blue jacket sleeves, the pen in his hand, and his inspired eye looking out upon the area. There doth he correct the brain-work which is to carry his name up above the earth, and keep it there, bright as cleaned plate. In the housekeeper's room, inspiration gives a double knock at his heart. An author in a pantry certainly writes under great disadvantages, for it cannot be said that he is there writing for his _bread_. In such a place, the loaf is in his eye--the larder is so near, he may almost dip his pen into it by mistake--and positive beef gleams through the veil of the safe, softened to his eye, yet still solider than beef of the imagination. In truth, a man has much to overcome in preparing food for the mind, in the very thick of food for the body;--for a good authority (no less a man than Mr. Bayes) has strenuously advised that the belly should be empty when the brain is to be unloaded. How can a gentleman's gentleman, with a _corpus_ that banishes his backbone nearly four feet from the table at which he sits, betake himself to his cogitations over a tankard of October, and expect to beat your true thin garret-haunting devil, with an inside like a pea-shooter, who can scarcely be said to be one remove from the ethereal, and who writes from that best of inspirations--an empty pantry? We shall presently see whether an author from below is better than one from above--whether it will be more eligible that the Muses should have several more stories to descend, when their nine ladyships are invoked so to do--and that the