three weeks. I must persuade myself, if I can, that these explosions will give me some repose; but there are too many chalk-eggs in the other fingers not to be hatched in succession.' HOW TO ESCAPE AN OLD STORY. Lord Cobham would tell stories, though he had few to tell, and those he told prosily. One day he was dining at Sir Richard Temple's. Bubb Dodington was present, and after dinner fell asleep, and had a pretty long nap. Temple rallied him, when Dodington tried to deny the fact, and offered to bet ten guineas that he would repeat all Cobham had been saying. His lordship accepted the wager, and dared Dodington to the proof. To his surprise, however, Bubb went through a story Cobham had been telling, nearly word for word. "Surely," said Temple, "you must possess the extraordinary faculty of sleeping with your eyes open.' "Far from it," replied Dodington; "when I dozed off, I knew that the period of the evening had arrived when Cobham would tell that story; so, I went to sleep accordingly." THE ART OF BORROWING. Bubb Dodington was one day walking down Bow-street, at the time it was well inhabited, and "resorted to by gentry for lodgings," when a borrowing acquaintance rushed from the opposite side of the way, and expressed great delight at meeting him; "for," said he, "I am wonderfully in want of a guinea." Dodington winced, and taking out his purse, showed that he had no more than half a guinea. "A thousand thanks," exclaimed the persecutor, half forcing the coin from between the owner's fingers, "that will do very well for the present;" and cleverly changed the subject to a good story. When they had parted, the brazen borrower returned to Dodington, saying: "By the bye, when will you pay me that half-guinea?"-" Pay you! what do you mean?" Why, I intended to borrow a guinea of you, and have only got half; but I'm not in a hurry for t'other; name your own time-only pray keep it." THE PALSIED GAMBLER. Hannah More used to relate that a foreign ambassador, Count Adhemar, had a stroke of palsy, and that he was to have had a great assembly on the night of the day on which it happened. It was on a Sunday! The company wentsome hundreds. The man lay deprived of sense and motion; his bedchamber joined the drawing-room, where was a farobank, held close to his bed's head. Somebody said, they thought they made too much noise. "Oh no," answered another, "it will do him good; the worst thing he can do is to sleep." A third said, "I did not think Adhemar had been a fellow of such rare spirit; palsy and faro together is spirited indeed; this is keeping it up !” The gentle Hannah related this to Walpole, who, in return, told her of a French gentleman at Paris, who, being in the article of death, had not signed his will, when the lawyer who drew it up was invited by his wife to stay supper. The table was laid in the dying man's apartment; the lawyer took a glass of wine, and addressing himself to the lady, drank "à la santé de notre aimable agonisant!" "I told Mr. Walpole," says Hannah, "he invented the story to out-do me, but he protested it was literally true." LOSING A FORTUNE. Sir John Bland is said to have flirted away his whole fortune at hazard. In one night he exceeded what was lost by the Duke of Bedford, having at one period of the night (though he recovered the greatest part of it) lost twoand-thirty thousand pounds. The citizens are said to have "put on their double-channeled pumps, and trudged to St. James's-street, in expectation of seeing judgments executed on White's-angels with flaming swords, and devils flying away with dice-boxes, like the prints in Sadeler's hermits.' Sir John lost this immense sum to a Captain Scott, who had nothing but a few debts and his commission. A REFORMED GAMESTER. Colonel Thomas Panton was a celebrated gamester of the time of the Restoration, and who, in one night, it is said, won as many thousands as purchased him an estate of above 1,500l. a-year. "After this good fortune," says Lucas, "he had such an aversion against all manner of games, that he would never handle cards or dice again; but lived very handsomely on his winnings to his dying day, which was in the year 1681. Colonel Panton was the last proprietor of the gaminghouse called Piccadilly Hall, and was in possession of land on the site of the streets and buildings which bear his name, as early as the year 1664. Yet we remember to have seen it stated that Panton-street was named from a particular kind of horse-shoe called a panton; and from its contiguity to the Haymarket, this origin was long credited. LOCAL FAME. "I remember," says Walpole, "how, long ago, I estimated local renown at its just value by a little sort of adventure that I will tell you; and since that there is an admirable chapter somewhere in Voltaire, which shows that more extended fame is but local on a little larger scale: it is the chapter of the Chinese who goes into a European bookseller's shop, and is amazed at finding none of the works of his most celebrated countrymen; while the bookseller finds the stranger equally ignorant of western classics. Horace then tells us how he went once with Mr. Rigby to see a window of painted glass at Messling, in Essex, and dined at a better sort of alehouse. The landlady waited on them, and was notably loquacious, entertaining them with the bon-mots and funny exploits of Mr. Charles. Mr. Charles said this, Mr. Charles played such a trick; oh! nothing was so pleasant as Mr. Charles. But, how astonished the poor soul was when they asked who Mr. Charles was; and how much more astonished when she found they had never heard of Mr. Charles Luchyn, who, it seems, was a relation of Lord Grimston, had lived in their village, and been the George Selwyn of half a dozen cottages. "If I had," adds Walpole, "a grain of ambitious pride left, it is what, in other respects, has been the thread that has run through my life, that of being forgotten: so true, except the folly of being an author, has been what I said last year to the Prince of Wales [George IV.] when he asked me if I was a Freemason, I replied, No, sir; I never was anything." Lady Charleville, Walpole's neighbour, told him, that having some company with her, one had been to see Strawberry. "Pray," said another, "who is that Mr. Walpole?" "Lord," cried a third, "don't you know the great epicure Mr. Walpole?" "Pho," said the fourth, "great epicure! you mean the antiquarian." When Horace bought a large parcel of bugles at a little shop in the city, and bade the proprietor send them to Sir Robert Walpole's, the shopkeeper coolly asked "Who is Sir Robert Walpole ?" COURT AND CITY. The contempt of the City for the Court, and the characteristic follies of public men, were humorously satirised in the following anonymous lines, which were in circulation in 1773 : "You I love, my dearest life, More than Georgey loves his wife More than Grosv'nor horns well gilt; More than Dartmouth loves field preachers, More than Huntingdon her teachers, More than Carlisle those who cheat him, More than Long Tom those who treat him, More than Pomfret a lead-mine, More than Weymouth play and wine, More than fools at wits to nibble, More than Walpole loves to scribble, More than Lyttleton to write, * More than Tories love the Stuarts, Than ever man loved fair before." WHAT IS ENNUI? Walpole, in a letter to Mr. Chute, writes from Houghton the following ludicrous account of one of his visitors, who seems to sit as the centre figure of his picture of Ennui : "I have an Aunt here, a family piece of goods, an old remnant of inquisitive hospitality and economy, who, to all intents and purposes, is as beefy as her neighbours. She wore me down so yesterday with interrogatories, that I dreamt all night, she was at my ear with 'whos,' and 'whys,' and 'whens,' and 'wheres,' till, at last, in my very sleep I cried out, 'For God in heaven's sake, madam, ask no more questions.' "Oh! my dear sir, don't you find that nine parts in ten of the world are of no use but to make you wish yourself with that tenth part? I am so far from growing used to mankind by living amongst them, that my natural ferocity and wildness does but every day grow worse. They tire me, they fatigue me; I don't know what to do with them; Í fling open the windows, and fancy I want air; and when I get by myself, I undress myself, and seem to have a bad people in my pockets, in my plaits, and on my shoulders! I indeed find this fatigue worse in country than in town, because one can avoid it there, and has more resources; but it is there too. I fear it is growing old; but I literally seem to have murdered a man whose name was Ennui, for his ghost is ever before me. They say there's no English word for ennui; I think you may translate it most literally by what is called entertaining people,' and 'doing the honours; that is, you sit an hour with somebody you don't know and don't care for, talk about the wind and the weather, and ask a thousand foolish questions, which all begin with, I think you live a good deal in the country,' or 'I think you don't love this thing or that.' Oh! tis dreadful!" DEATH OF LORD CHESTERFIELD. Lord Chesterfield's declining years, though now and then brightened by flashes of wit and merriment, were clouded by sickness and despondency. His ruling passion was ruffled in |