Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 'iwMV Wf farewell to painting. If I have trespassed on the preserve of Mr. Weathercock—(by the bye, why does not Mr. Weathercock go on with his pleasant lectures on prints and painters ? Why does he, like a coy and beautiful virgin, shun the eye of his lovers, the ' admiring public ?' Is there not much still to speak of—fields that remain to be won ? Let him write again—and again)—if I have trespassed on Mr. Weathercock's preserve, I trust that gay and gentle critic will excuse it." But the Weathercock was declared to be " steadfast for laok of oil," and the final paper of Janus in the number for January, 1823, produced this editorial note significant of his retirement from periodical -writing :—" The winter must be very hard—as it was expected to be—for honest Master Janus Weathercock has, in the present number, ' composed his decent head and breathed his last.' But we are acquainted with his tricks, and well know how subject he is to wilful trances and violent wakings. The newspapers told us the other day of a person who could counterfeit death to such a nicety, as to deceive even an undertaker; now our readers must not be surprised to find Janus get up, after his laying out, and go about his ordinary concerns. Depend upon it, readers, he resembles the Spectator's sleeper at the ' Cock and Bottle,' and is no more dead than we are!" Nor does the scrap in the number for February, 1826, under the familiar signature, quite prove the contrary, since there is a look about it, as if it had reached the Magazine at second hand—some waif left in the editor's basket or transmitted through a friend. All the regular contributors to the London were professional men of letters, not all of them precisely dependent on their exertions in this way for their subsistence, but men who...