plates and jingling of knives and forks, dinner is her abhorrence. Nor are the other common pursuits of life more in her favour. Walking ex

hausts the breath that might be better employed. Dancing is a noisy diversion, and singing is worse. She cannot endure any music, except the long, grand, dull concerts, which nobody thinks of listening to. Reading and chess she classes together as silent barbarisms, unworthy of a social and civilized people. Cards, too, have their faults; there is a rivalry, a mute eloquence in those four aces, that leads away the attention; besides, partners will sometimes scold; so she never plays at cards: and upon the strength of this abstinence had very nearly passed for serious, till it was discovered that she could not abide a long sermon. She always looks out for the shortest preacher, and never went to above one Bible Meeting in her life.-"Such speeches!" quoth she: "I thought the men never meant to have done. People have great need of patience." Plays of course she abhors, and operas, and mobs, and all things that will be heard, especially children; though for babies, particularly when asleep, for dogs and pictures, and such silent intelligences as serve to talk of and talk to, she has a considerable partiality; and an agreeable and gracious flattery to the mamas and other owners of these pretty dumb things is a very usual introduction to her miscellaneous harangues. The matter of these orations is inconceivably various. Perhaps the local and genealogical anecdotes, the sort of supplement to the history of ***** shire, may be her strongest

point; but she shines almost as much in medicine and housewifery. Her medical dissertations savour a little of that particular branch of the science called quackery. She has a specific against almost every disease to which the human frame is liable; and is terribly prosy and unmerciful in her symptoms. Her cures kill. In housekeeping, her notions resemble those of other verbal managers; full of economy and retrenchment, with a leaning towards reform, though she loves so well to declaim on the abuses in the cook's department, that I am not sure that she would very heartily thank any radical who should sweep them quite away. For the rest, her system sounds very finely in theory, but rather fails in practice. Her recipes would be capital, only that some way or other they don't eat well; her preserves don't keep; and her sweet wines are sure to turn sour. These are certainly her favourite topics; but any one will do. Allude to

some anecdote of the neighbourhood, and she forthwith treats you with as many parallel passages as are to be found in an air with variations. Take up a new publication, and she is equally at home there; for though she knows little of books, she has, in the course of an up-and-down life, met with a good many authors, and teases and provokes you by telling of them precisely what you do not care to hear, the maiden names of their wives, and the christian names of their daughters, and into what families their sisters and cousins married, and in what towns they have lived, what streets, and what numbers. Boswell himself never drew up the table of

Dr. Johnson's Fleet-street courts with greater care than she made out to me the successive residences of P. P. Esq., author of a tract on the French Revolution, and a pamphlet on the Poor Laws. The very weather is not a safe subject. Her memory is a perpetual register of hard frosts, and long droughts, and high winds, and terrible storms, with all the evils that followed in their train, and all the personal events connected with them; so that if you happen to remark that the clouds are come up, and you fear it may rain, she replies-"Ay, it is just such a morning as three-and-thirty years ago, when my poor cousin was married-you remember my cousin Mary-she married so and so, the son of so and so;" and then comes the whole pedigree of the bridegroom, the amount of the settlements, and the reading and signing them overnight; a description of the wedding dresses, in the style of Sir Charles Grandison; and how much the bride's gown cost per yard; the names, residences, and a short subsequent history of the bridemaids and men, the gentlemen who gave the bride away, and the clergyman who performed the ceremony, with a learned antiquarian digression relative to the church; then the setting out in procession; the marriage; the kissing; the crying; the breakfasting; the drawing the cake through the ring; and finally the bridal excursion, which brings us back again at an hour's end to the starting-post, the weather, and the whole story of the sopping, the drying, the clothes-spoiling, the cold-catching, and all the small evils of a summer shower, By this time

it rains, and she sits down to a pathetic seesaw of conjectures on the chance of Mrs. Smith's having set out for her daily walk, or the possibility that Dr. Brown may have ventured to visit his patients in his gig, and the certainty that Lady Green's new housemaid would come from London on the outside of the coach.

With all this intolerable prosing, she is actually reckoned a pleasant woman! Her acquaintance in the great manufacturing town, where she usually resides, is very large, which may partly account for the misnomer. Her conversation is of a sort to bear dividing. Besides, there is, in all large societies, an instinctive sympathy which directs each individual to the companion most congenial to his humour. Doubtless her associates deserve the old French compliment, Ils ont tous un grand talent pour le silence. Parceled out amongst some seventy or eighty, there may even be some savour in her talk. It is the tête-à-tête that kills, or the small fireside circle of three or four, where only one can speak, and all the rest must seem to listen-seem! did I say?-must listen in good earnest. Hotspur's expedient in a similar situation, of crying "Hem! Go to," and marking not a word, will not do here; compared to her, Owen Glendower was no conjuror. She has the eye of a hawk, and detects a wandering glance, an incipient yawn, the slightest movement of impatience. The very needle must be quiet. If a pair of scissors do but wag, she is affronted, draws herself up, breaks off in the middle of a story, of a sentence, of a word, and the unlucky culprit must, for civility sake, sum.

mon a more than Spartan fortitude, and beg the torturer to resume her torments.-" That, that is the unkindest cut of all!" I wonder, if she had happened to have married, how many husbands she would have talked to death. It is certain that none of her relations are long-lived after she comes to reside with them. Father, mother, uncle, sister, brother, two nephews, and one neice, all these have successively passed away, though a healthy race, and with no visible disorderexcept-but we must not be uncharitable. They might have died, though she had been born dumb:-" It is an accident that happens every day." Since the decease of her last nephew, she attempted to form an establishment with a widow lady, for the sake, as they both said, of the comfort of society. But-strange miscalculation!she was a talker too! They parted in a week.

And we have parted too. I am just returned from escorting her to the coach, which is to convey her two hundred miles westward; and I have still the murmur of her adieu resounding in my ears, like the indistinct hum of the air on a frosty night. It was curious to see how almost simultaneously her mournful adieu shaded into cheerful salutations of her new comrades, the passengers in the mail. Poor souls! Little does the civil young lad who made way for her, or the fat lady, his mama, who with pains and inconvenience made room for her, or the grumpy gentleman in the opposite corner, who, after some dispute, was at length won to admit her dressing box,-little do they suspect what is to befall them. Two hundred miles! and she never sleeps