+Caveat emptor+!  This is the age of fraud, imposture, substitution, transmutation, adulteration, abomination, contamination, and many others of the same sinister ending, always excepting purification.  Every thing is debased and sophisticated, and “nothing is but what is not.”  All things are mixed, lowered, debased, deteriorated, by our cozening dealers and shopkeepers; and, bad as they are, there is every reason to fear that they are “mox daturos progeniem vitiosiorem.”  We wonder at the increase of bilious and dyspeptic patients, at the number of new books upon stomach complaints, at the rapid fortunes made by practitioners who undertake (the very word is ominous) to cure indigestion; but how can it be otherwise, when Accum, before he took to quoting with his scissors, assured us there was “poison in the pot;” when a recent writer has shown that there are still more deleterious ingredients in the wine-bottle; and when we ourselves have all had dismal intestine evidence that our bread is partly made of ground bones, alum, plaster of Paris; our tea, of aloe-leaves; our beer, of injurious drugs; our milk, of snails and chalk; and that even the water supplied to us by our companies is any thing rather than the real Simon Pure it professes to be.  Not less earnestly than benevolently do our quack doctors implore us to beware of spurious articles; Day and Martin exhort us not to take our polish from counterfeit blacking:  every advertiser beseeches the “pensive public” to be upon its guard against supposititious articles—­all, in short, is knavery, juggling, cheating, and deception.—­Ibid.

* * * * *

Retrospective Gleanings

SONNET

BY HENRY TEONOE, A SEA CHAPLAIN IN THE REIGN OF CHARLES II.

Composed October the First, over against the East part of Candia.

O!  Ginnee was a bony lasse,
  Which maks the world to woonder
How ever it should com to passe
  That wee did part a sunder.

The driven snow, the rose so rare,
  The glorious sunne above thee,
Can not with my Ginnee compare,
  She was so wonderous lovely.

Her merry lookes, her forhead high,
  Her hayre like golden-wyer,
Her hand and foote, her lipe or eye,
  Would set a saint on fyre.

And for to give Giunee her due,
  Thers no ill part about her;
The turtle-dove’s not half so true;
  Then whoe can live without her?

King Solomon, where ere he lay,
  Did nere unbrace a kinder;
O! why should Ginnee gang away,
  And I be left behind her?

Then will I search each place and roome
  From London to Virginny,
From Dover-peere to Scanderoone,
  But I will finde my Ginny.

But Ginny’s turned back I feare,
  When that I did not mind her;
Then back to England will I steare,
  To see where I can find her.