“He bears no tokens of the sabler streams,
  But soars far off among the swans of Thames.”

Pleasant people of this kind of constitution you see going about of a morning rather in dishabille—­hair uncombed haply—­face and hands even unwashed—­and shirt with a somewhat day-before-yesterdayish hue.  Yet are they, so far from being dirty, at once felt, seen, and smelt, to be among the very cleanest of his majesty’s subjects.  The moment you shake hands with them, you feel in the firm flesh of palm and finger that their heart’s blood circulates purely and freely from the point of the highest hair on the apex of the pericranium, to the edge of the nail on the large toe of the right foot.  Their eyes are as clean as unclouded skies—­the apples on their cheeks are like those on the tree—­what need, in either case, of rubbing off dust or dew with a towel?  What though, from sleeping without a night-cap, their hair may be a little toosey?  It is not dim—­dull—­oily—­like half-withered sea-weeds!  It will soon comb itself with the fingers of the west wind—­that tent-like tree its toilette—­its mirror that pool of the clear-flowing Tweed.

Irishmen are generally sweet—­at least in their own green isle.—­So are Scotchmen.  Whereas, blindfolded, take a cockney’s hand, immediately after it has been washed and scented, and put it to your nose—­and you will begin to be apprehensive that some practical wit has substituted in lieu of the sonnet-scribbling bunch of little fetid fives, the body of some chicken-butcher of a weasel, that died of the plague.  We have seen as much of what is most ignorantly and malignantly denominated dirt—­one week’s earth—­washed off the feet of a pretty young girl on a Saturday night, at a single sitting, in the little rivulet that runs almost round about her father’s hut, as would have served a cockney to raise his mignionette in, or his crop of cresses.  How beautifully glowed the crimson-snow of the singing creature’s new-washed feet!

It will be seen, from these hurried remarks, that there is more truth than Dr. Kitchiner was aware of in his apophthegm—­that a clean skin may be regarded as next in efficacy to a clear conscience.  But the doctor had but a very imperfect notion of the meaning of the words—­clean skin—­his observation being not even skin-deep.  A wash-hand basin—­a bit of soap—­and a coarse towel—­he thought would give a cockney on Ludgate-hill a clean skin—­just as many good people think that a Bible, a prayer-book, and a long sermon can give a clear conscience to a criminal in Newgate.  The cause of the evil, in both cases, lies too deep for tears.  Millions of men and women pass through nature to eternity clean-skinned and pious—­with slight expense either in soap or sermons; while millions more, with much week-day bodily scrubbing, and much Sabbath spiritual sanctification, are held in bad odour here, while they live, by those who happen to sit near them, and finally go out like the snuff of a candle.—­Blackwoods Magazine.