A
Treatise on Adulterated Provisions.
By FREDRICK ACCUM.
THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT.
II. KINGS—CHAP. VI. VERSE XI.
(From Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, No. XXXV. Page 542.)
Mr. Accum, it appears, is one of those very good-natured friends, who is quite resolved not to allow us to be cheated and poisoned as our fathers were before us, and our children will be after us, without cackling to us of our danger, and opening our eyes to abysses of fraud and imposition, of the very existence of which we had until now the good fortune to be entirely ignorant. His book is a perfect death’s head, a memento mori, the perusal of any single chapter of which is enough to throw any man into the blue devils for a fortnight. Mr. Accum puts us something in mind of an officious blockhead, who, instead of comforting his dying friend, is continually jogging him on the elbow with such cheering assurances as the following. “I am sorry there is no hope; my dear fellow, you must kick the bucket soon. Your liver is diseased, your lungs gone, your bowels as impenetrable as marble, your legs swelled like door-posts, your face as yellow as a guinea, and the doctor just now assured me you could not live a week.”
Mr. Accum’s work is evidently written in the same spirit of dark and melancholy anticipation, which pervades Dr. Robison’s celebrated “Proofs of a Conspiracy, &c. against all the crowned heads of Europe.” The conspiracy disclosed by Mr. Accum is certainly of a still more dreadful nature, and is even more widely ramified than that which excited so much horror in the worthy professor. It is a conspiracy of brewers, bakers, grocers, wine-merchants, confectioners, apothecaries, and cooks, against the lives of all and every one of his majesty’s liege subjects. It is easy to see that Mr. Accum’s nerves are considerably agitated, that—