eyes. Ten minutes after I had left my seat upon the box, I found myself as comfortable as if winter had been banished to the Pole, and the word Rus expunged from the Dictionary of Nature.

Is there a happier hour in the recollection of a human being than that in which, after a cold seat on the outside of the mail, with the wind whistling round the enormous hat of the coachman, jutting past the promontory of his shoulder, and doubling the cape so as to come with full force on your unprotected visage, you at last arrive in the coffee-room, with fires blazing, gas shining, clean sanded floors, and a couple of grilled fowls smoking in a quiet box for your own peculiar entertainment, flanked with a huge hirlas of Meux's own, and succeeded by toasted cheese, and an ad libitum of cogniac and water? Moments such as these never depart from the memory. Old men of eighty years of age remember (after their sainted wives are quietly forgotten) the hot suppers which enchanted them after cold and travelling sixty years before. The eye of one of these, which is dimly fixed on the white head of his youngest granddaughter, and scarcely distinguishes the flaxen ringlets on which his palsied hand is laid, sees quite distinctly the beef-steaks which cheered him that dreadfully cold night in November when he returned from London in the year 1769. With preternatural vision he beholds the foam of the tankard, and recollects even the individual features of the fowl, the breast melting in loveliness and gravy, the parson's nose lying half hid beneath the odoriferous ocean, and the mushrooms scat tered over its surface, as the Isles of Greece repose on the bosom of the blue Ægean. All these memories come vividly back upon his heart; and, in the gradual failing of nature-in the decay of his fancy, and blunting of his feelings the suppers of his youth are the only ties which still bind him to his fellows. Yes! till the last pulse of pain in my gouty toe, before it follows my other foot into the grave-till Memory comes to the last page of her day-book, and Death writes Finis to all the accounts of life -shall I remember, with a pensive and melancholy satisfaction, the pe

tits soupers of the Castle and Ball! Thomas's brown wig and the bald pate of Bob shall be equally dear to my heart; and whisky punch shall be to me a blank in the creation ere I forget one smile of the loveliest bar-maid and best maker of toddy in the King's wide dominions. On one occasion, and one only, I established myself at a boarding-house; but great and manifold are the dangers and discomforts of that situation. For the first two days I sat at dinner next to a young lady, who paid me the most marvellous attentions. Smiles followed my commonest remarks; and, such is the force of good-nature, I almost began to fancy, in spite of a squint, and an unusual prolongation of the nasal feature, that she was interesting and pretty. A friend of mine, who had received a call to repentance just before marrying a lady of great piety and fortune, was very desirous of effecting a similar conversion upon me; and, on my dining with him, he reasoned very deeply on the ugliness of vice and the beauty of virtue, magnifying at the same time the charms of temperance, till, in the middle of a sentence about matrimony and hell, his eyes grew glazed, his mouth opened to a superhuman width, and, about the same moment, a confusion came on my own thoughts, for which I have never been able to account. I recollect, however, that I left him with tears running down his cheeks, muttering something which sounded very like a song. On arriving at my temporary domicile, I hurried as rapidly and unostentatiously as possible up stairs, but unluckily encountered some one in my progress-rank, name, and denomination to me unknown. Oblivion rests on what I said on that occasion, and all my efforts to remember only involve me in greater uncertainty and forgetfulness. Next morning, what deep silence brooded over the breakfast table-what awful dignity gloomed upon every brow!-alas! even my smiling friend smiled and was attentive to me no more. She, it appeared, had been my fair interlocutor in my hurried ascent to my couch; and from what I gathered from the hints of the disconsolate damsel herself, and the hostess's guarded enquiries, I began to discover that I

had been somewhat too polite and complimentary, and even raved a great deal about post-horses and Gretna Green. I was now asked by a fat old lady, who turned out to be my Dulcinea's aunt, whether I was serious in my proposals, and if so, (which she could not permit herself to doubt,) what I was disposed to settle on her amiable, injured, too susceptible, but unportioned niece. I professed a total ignorance of the whole transaction, hinted that I was liable to fits of madness, in corroboration of which, I gnashed my teeth, and looked as horrible as I could, and next day removed into the delights and freedom of an inn. It is a melancholy circumstance, that in a Christian land there should be places in which it is impossible to walk up stairs without a candle after a quiet dinner with a friend, without a manifest risk of stumbling into a marriage. Luckily, in a hotel there is no such danger as this. Boots and the head waiter, who convey any incapacitated gentleman to his room, rarely translate his compliments and praises into a declaration of attachment; so that, after an agreeable night of çigars and conversation, I can comfortably lay myself down to sleep, in the assurance of waking next morning to the enjoyment of celibacy and soda-water.

On first arriving in a town, I know nothing so detestable as letters of introduction; but luckily, though it is impossible to refuse them from your friends, there is not the least necessity for presenting them. I have at this moment, I suppose, some scores of unknown acquaintances at the bottom of my trunk, whose fate I often pity in having no opportunity of securing the friendship of an individual so wonderfully recommended. A man ought always to form his own friends, and assuredly there is no such field for a crop of them as the coffee-room of an inn. There you may speak for half an hour to your neighbour on any subject you please: if you find him a violent whig, aliberal, a profane swearer, or a hypocrite, or any thing of that sort, treat him in future with the silent contempt he deserves. But if you discover him to be one of the right kind, how easy it is to convert the distance of unintroduced acquaintance into the cordiality of old and well-cemented friendship.

If you once dine together in the same box, before you have demolished the last limb of the turkey, and sipt the last glass of the Madeira, his face is as familiar to you as your glove,and at the end of the evening, amidst the wreck of devilled bones, and the remnants of what once was " fruit and flower," opposite to you in a dim, mystic indistinctness, awful, and yet wonderfully beloved, you see sitting the chosen friend of your soul, whose name (which you never heard) you wonder you have forgotten, whose friends, home, parentage, and education, are to you mere objects of conjecture, but who, in the absence of all collateral ties, as you swallow the last bumper to his health, is "dear as the ruddy drops which warm your heart."

Such friendships as these are generally lasting. You take a personal pride in finding you have not been deceived in your choice, and he is endeared to you by being a friend entirely of your own acquisition Far different this from the feelings you entertain towards the friend of your friend. In this case his kindness appears to you to be scarcely voluntary, and you fancy it is less bestowed on you, quasi yourself, than as the representative of the person who introduced you. You are assured that any one with the same recommendation, would be received with the same attention; and even the smiles of the ladies, though in the first instance falling on yourself, you fear may have been intended to "cannon" on your friend. You enact the miserable part of the hat stuck on a pole, to which as much deference is paid as to the distant individual who hung it there; but, in spite of all the kindness and hospitality of those around you, you can't help feeling all the time that if Gesler is deposed, the hat will sink from its high estate, and become a very ordinary, and by no means a favourite, beaver. To a man, who, like myself, trusts to his own taste in the selection of his friends, Bath is an inexhaustible store shop, where he may find them of all sorts and sizes, almost ready made. An universal philanthropy seems spread over all its inhabitants, and every county in England, Scotland, and the Emerald Isle, seems to send a deputation of the most warm-hearted and access

ible of its sons and daughters to the city of King Bladud. The ladies are winning beyond any ill-favoured Benedict's belief. The high cheekbones of Aberdeenawa, the delicate brogue of Munster, and the pure red and white of Lancashire or Surrey, are all there-equally profuse of their smiles and kindness, and equally ready to form a friendship to be ended only with their lives. Alas! that it is impossible to retain for any length of time the vantage ground of non-acquaintance! Few faces can stand the test of intimacy. Some tooth absent without leave is discovered to the watchful observer in the negligence of the laugh, or some trait of temper contracts the marble brow, where to the unacquainted beholder good-humour "or solemn contemplation love to dwell." And besides this advantage, unless you converse with the object of your admiration, you run no risk of having that admiration diminished by an exhibition of her colloquial defects. At night, in the pauses of conversation among the beaux esprits of the Divan, you can whiff your cigar, and raise a lovely dream of the pure and delicate maiden you admired in the morning in the circus. No rude reality comes in the semblance of a silly question to destroy the magic of those rosy lips, no vacant stare dims the celestial loveliness of those deep blue eyes; but there she smiles upon you through the thin haze issuing from your gently breathing Havannah, clothed in all earthly beauty, like a goddess of the days of old, revealing herself to some favoured worshipper through the shadowing drapery of her ambrosial cloud. But short-lived and transitory is this blissful state of ignorance and admiration. By a variety of meetings, you cannot tell where, by seeing her smile so often that at Jast you fancy she smiles on you,-by sitting in the same box at the play, and bowing to her cousin, with whom she is generally to be found, you are surprised to discover, in spite of your efforts to remain "alike unknowing and unknown," that you have met, and smiled, and cousined yourself into an acquaintance. Farewell after that, to the long protracted and unheeded gaze,-farewell to the turn of admiration after you are past, farewell to dream, and reverie

and romance! Sad reality steps in, and overturns your "noble theories,"

and the being that you painted as the inhabitant of some fairy bower, the creature who had been the object of your far-off wonder and veneration,-" Too fair to worship, too divine to love," you are forced to confess resides on the second floor of a boarding-house in Pulteney Street, is solicitous about the colour of a ribbon, and above all things else in the world is anxious to get married.

But, alas! even in a town, Time's progress scarcely deserves the name of flight. No contrivances can protract breakfast beyond twelve o'clock. Anewspaper-puffs, advertisements, and all-is but a brief enjoyment to those whom the schoolmaster and the march of intellect have taught to read without stopping very often to spell. For my own part, I was grateful to the Russian Campaign; the very names of the heroes on either side were a tower of strength, and prolonged the perusal by at least twenty minutes. But after a while I felt tempted to skip over those prodigious combinations of consonants, and was contented to believe in the capture and demolition of unnameable towns by gallant and unpronounceable generals. The Herald, talented and well-edited paper as it is, comes by degrees to a conclusion; street and square, bustling and beautiful though they be, grow silent and deserted; the pump-room, where every fiddlestick seems less imbued with rosin than Rossini, closes its charmed doors, or exchanges the group of beauty, and the swell of music, for the tottering steps of superannuated invalids. Day after day you miss some glass of fashion, or some mould of form, from her accustomed walk. "Star after star decays,"-gaiety comes imperceptibly to a close,-concerts are less frequent, and the silver voice of Manners only at intervals, few and far between, wraps your senses in Elysium; and in fact, (for there is no denying it,) Bath itself becomes as dull and vapid as a pseudo-religious poem. Amidst the most fearful forebodings of the amount of your bill, you determine on migration ; you mourn over the changeableness of pleasure, as you extricate your name from the ill-omened side of the ledger of the classic Tully, in

secutive sentences without the most alarming and portentous stuttering; prosers shew their piety in lauding the gods for that they have not been made poetical, and are naturally as afraid of a figure of speech as of a ghost; a summer-up of the tottle of the whole, finding no rhetoric in Cocker, despises it even in a Canning; and none are so incapable of judging of the argumentative as the disputatious :-But the men of true power or genius, and who can themselves, as occasion requires, deal in declamation, rhetoric, poetry, reasoning, like Plunkett or Brougham, have admitted that Mr Sadler is-as the world goes-a master in all those arts, and that on great subjects which he has studied, and on which he rises prepared, AN ORATOR,

But our business is not now with this distinguished man as a member of Parliament-he comes before the public as the author of one of the most ingenious, able, and learned works, on perhaps the most difficult and important part of Political Economy, that has been given to the world since Political Economy deserved the name of a mixed Science. In an early number we shall give an ample statement of his refutation of the Malthusian doctrine; and also an account of that doctrine which he would substitute in its place. The work was a good deal abused before it was published, by some ingenious persons, who, since its publication, have been mum; nor, as far as we have seen, have any of the Malthusians yet made upon it any formidable attack. An answer to it, consisting of a couple of columns, appeared in that most excellent weekly paper, the Spectator; but though evidently written by an able man and conversant with the science, it was truly a lame and most manc affair. The writer was much puzzled and perplexed with Mr Sadler's long tables of figures and well he might-for they contain calculations that seem to furnish the most appalling refutations of many of the statements on which Mr Malthus sought to base his doctrine. If Mr Sadler is to be answered at all, it will not be in a couple of columns, but it must be in a book. The Spectator is strong in its Political Economy, as indeed it is in almost every thing else; and we read, if not with

out entire conviction, certainly with pleasure and profit, that very ingenious plan of Emigration which formed an appendix to one of its numbers a few months ago. Let the writer of that appendix give us another in refutation of Mr Sadler, and we pledge ourselves that it shall not go without an adverse, but, at the same time, a friendly notice, as long perhaps as itself. The Spectator is a fair and honourable opponent, though he would lose no character by ceasing to sneer at such a man as Mr Sadler; but other papers there are, some without power, some without principle, and some without either who keep dogging Mr Sadler's heels after the uncertain fashion of curs, who sometimes on the street push their snoking noses against the calves of the lieges' legs, whether in blind search of a master, or in blinder hydrophobia, who can say?-though none can deny that they deserve their kicking. How sardonically laughs the public-pensive no more-at the mongrels who imagine themselves Cynics, simply because they can bark! They have entered into a league, offensive and defensive, to sneer down a certain public character-say Mr Sadler— and, on the third Saturday, they are stifled in their own slaver, Derision must be made of sterner stuff than an article even in the Times to "sneer down"-that we believe is the usual slang word of all slanderous scribblers-any man of the most ordinary intellectual stature; for it is astonishing to see the successful stand made even by a weak honest man against the strongest knave. But when the Sneered-at is great in intellectual and moral power, and the Sneerer wholly worthless, the growl of the peevish starveling becomes a croak, and the croak a hiss, and the hiss a gasp that speaks of suicide by strangulation. So it often is-and in no other case more conspicuously than in Mr Sadler's-with some of the guides, forsooth, of Public Opinion! But the admirable old Public, God bless her!-nay,say not old-the admirable young, bold, bright, and buxom Public-just like Miss in her teens running off to Gretna-Green with her own chosen suitor, out of a score of sailors, and soldiers, and civilians -selects such a man, for example, as the member of Newark, places her