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THE

GOSSIP;

OR

LITERARY, DOMESTIC, and useful

RECORDER:

CONTAINING

A Variety of Original and Select Articles,

BY FRANCIS FIDDLEWOOD.

Since pulpits fail, and sounding boards reflect
Most part an empty ineffectual sound,
What chance that I, to fame so little known,
Should speak to purpose, or with better hope
Crack the satiric thong?"

Cowper.

Falmouth:

PRINTED FOR THE EDITOR, BY A. HOLMES.

1826.

DL

22.00 1028

LIBRAR

PREFACE.

Journeying with a friend along the banks of the Martha-brae River, the subject of publication became the ascendant in conversation, and this led to the inquiry, how a small periodical would be likely to meet with success in so limited a community as that of Falmouth-my friend replied, that "nothing of the kind would do-that periodicals had already been attempted in Kingston; and some ability had been displayed in them." To which I replied, "they were not characterised by the utile dulce,' and consequently did not command general attraction. I shall try the experiment," said I, " on a different plan from these publications, and endeavour to form it according to the precept of Horace,"

Profit and pleasure, try to mix with art,

To inform the judgment, nor offend the heart.

The original matter, which has been written, often hurriedly, and surrounded by difficulties, for the first articles of each number, will be sufficient to form a volume of itself, with a few original essays that may be added to it; but this may be a subject for future

consideration. I am perfectly satisfied with the success of this little work, and from which circumstance, several of the back numbers are out of print, which will, for a week or two, prevent my publisher supplying the demand for complete sets; but they who have already obtained the First Part can now be supplied with both the Second and Third Parts.

If, in the course of my lucubrations I have unintentionally depicted the misfortunes of any one, who feels aggrieved by their exposure, yet wishes to state his complaint in a formal and respectful manner, I will not refuse to give him the satisfaction of explanation. But I must know whether they may have been actual misfortunes or eggregious faults—if the former, it must have been unintentional—if the latter, he must learn to cure them, as, what some gloss over by the term "misfortunes," like the wayward aberrations of all who quaff the poisonous bowl of infatuation, who "know the right, and still the wrong pursue," approximate so closely to faults that they escape the vigilance of the most active discrimination to point out their difference, which fully proves that all this has been more the misfortune than the fault of

Falmouth, December 1, 1826.

THE AUTHOR.

[graphic]

THE GOSSIP;

A Literary, Domestic, and Useful Publication,

BY FRANCIS FIDDLEWOOD.

No. 1.

THE

66 A CHIEL'S AMANG YE TAKIN' NOTES,
AN' FAITH HE'LL PRENT IT."

FEBRUARY 8, 1826. Price 10d.

THE GOSSIP.

"We three,
Gossips be."

HE most useful, and, paradoxical though it may appear, the most useless of all characters, is a gossip, in the common acceptation of the word-I mean of course a professed and inveterate gossip-a being that can no more exist without gossip than an opium eater without opium-who is fed upon gossip, and feeds others with gossip-one that barely vegetates without it-a sort of sentient animal without thinking or a thinking being without perception. His calculations never reach beyond his nose, which accounts for his often running his head against a post, and this renders him paradoxically useful to others, who naturally draw a similitude between the head and the post to a shipwreck and beacon. Thus proving the axiom of

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