Attack our books, Mr. Correspondent, and welcome.  They are fair subjects for just censure or praise.  But woe be to you, if you allow private rancors or animosities to influence you in the discharge of your public duty.  In the little court where you are paid to sit as judge, as critic, you owe it to your employers, to your conscience, to the honor of your calling, to deliver just sentences; and you shall have to answer to heaven for your dealings, as surely as my Lord Chief Justice on the Bench.  The dignity of letters, the honor of the literary calling, the slights put by haughty and unthinking people upon literary men,—­don’t we hear outcries upon these subjects raised daily?  As dear Sam Johnson sits behind the screen, too proud to show his threadbare coat and patches among the more prosperous brethren of his trade, there is no want of dignity in him, in that homely image of labor ill-rewarded, genius as yet unrecognized, independence sturdy and uncomplaining.  But Mr. Nameless, behind the publisher’s screen uninvited, peering at the company and the meal, catching up scraps of the jokes, and noting down the guests’ behavior and conversation,—­what a figure his is!  Allons, Mr. Nameless!  Put up your note-book; walk out of the hall; and leave gentlemen alone who would be private, and wish you no harm.

TUNBRIDGE TOYS.

I wonder whether those little silver pencil-cases with a movable almanac at the butt-end are still favorite implements with boys, and whether pedlers still hawk them about the country?  Are there pedlers and hawkers still, or are rustics and children grown too sharp to deal with them?  Those pencil-cases, as far as my memory serves me, were not of much use.  The screw, upon which the movable almanac turned, was constantly getting loose.  The 1 of the table would work from its moorings, under Tuesday or Wednesday, as the case might be, and you would find, on examination, that Th. or W. was the 23 1/2 of the month (which was absurd on the face of the thing), and in a word your cherished pencil-case an utterly unreliable time-keeper.  Nor was this a matter of wonder.  Consider the position of a pencil-case in a boy’s pocket.  You had hard-bake in it; marbles, kept in your purse when the money was all gone; your mother’s purse, knitted so fondly and supplied with a little bit of gold, long since—­prodigal little son!—­scattered amongst the swine—­I mean amongst brandy-balls, open tarts, three-cornered puffs, and similar abominations.  You had a top and string; a knife; a piece of cobbler’s wax; two or three bullets; a Little Warbler; and I, for my part, remember, for a considerable period, a brass-barrelled pocket-pistol (which would fire beautifully, for with it I shot off a button from Butt Major’s jacket);—­with all these things, and ever so many more, clinking and rattling in your pockets, and your hands, of course, keeping them in perpetual movement, how could you expect your movable almanac not to be twisted out of its place now and again—­your pencil-case to be bent—­your liquorice water not to leak out of your bottle over the cobbler’s wax, your bull’s-eyes not to ram up the lock and barrel of your pistol, and so forth.