ence doing the honors of his new pu.chase, when he has fairly housed it. You must view it in every light, till he has found the best-placing it at this distance, and at that, but always suiting the focus of your sight to his own. You must spy at it through your fingers, to catch the aerial perspective, though you assure him that to you the landscape shows much more agreeable without that artifice. Woe be to the luckless wight, who does not only not respond to his rapture, but who should drop an unseasonable intimation of preferring one of his anterior bargains to the present!

The last is always his best hit his "Cynthia of the minute." -Alas! how many a mild Madonna have I known to come in a Raphael!- keep its ascendancy for a few brief moons, then, after certain intermedial degradations, from the front drawing-room to the back gallery, thence to the dark parlor, — adopted in turn by each of the Carracci, under successive lowering ascriptions of filiation, mildly breaking its fall, consigned to the oblivious lumber-room, go out at last a Lucca Giordano, or plain Carlo Maratti!— which things when I beheld—musing upon the chances and mutabilities of fate below, hath made me to reflect upon the altered condition of great personages, or that woful Queen of Richard the Second

set forth in pomp,

She came adorned hither like sweet May.

Sent back like Hallowmas or shortest day.

With great love for you, J. E. hath but a limited sympathy with what you feel or do. He lives in a world of his own, and makes slender guesses at what passes in your mind. He never pierces the marrow of

your habits. He will tell an old established play-goer, that Mr. Such-a-one, of So-and-so (naming one of the theatres,) is a very lively comedian-as a piece of news! He advertised me but the other day of some pleasant green lanes which he had found out for me, knowing me to be a great walker, in my own immediate vicinity who have haunted the identical spot any time these twenty years! He has not much respect for that class of feelings which goes by the name of sentimental. He applies the definition of real evil to bodily sufferings exclusively — and rejecteth all others as imaginary. He is affected by the sight, or the bare supposition, of a creature in pain, to a degree which I have never witnessed out of womankind. A constitutional acuteness to this class of sufferings may in part account for this. The animal tribe in particular he taketh under his especial protection. A broken-winded or spur-galled horse is sure to find an advocate in him. An overloaded ass is his client forever. He is the apostle to the brute kind—the never-failing friend of those who have none to care for them. The contemplation of a lobster boiled, or eels skinned alive, will wring him so, that "all for pity he could die." It will take the savor from his palate, and the rest from his pillow for days and nights. With the intense feeling of Thomas Clarkson, he wanted only the steadiness of pursuit, and unity of purpose, of that "true yokefellow with Time," to have effected as much for the Animal, as he hath done for the Negro Creation. But my uncontrollable cousin is but imperfectly formed for purposes which demand coöperation. He cannot wait. His amelioration plans must be ripened in a day. For this reason he has cut but an equivocal figure in be

nevolent societies, and combinations for the alleviation of human sufferings. His zeal constantly makes him to outrun, and put out, his coadjutors. He thinks of relieving, — while they think of debating.

blackballed out of a society for the Relief of

He was

because the fervor of his humanity toiled beyond the formal apprehension, and creeping processes of his associates. I shall always consider this distinction as a patent of nobility in the Elia family!

Do I mention these seeming inconsistencies to smile at, or upbraid my unique cousin? Marry, heaven, and all good manners, and the understanding that should be between kinsfolk, forbid! With all the strangenesses of this strangest of the Elias- I would not have him in one jot or tittle other than he is; neither would I barter or exchange my wild kinsman for the most exact, regular, and every way consistent kinsman breathing.

In my next, reader, I may perhaps give you some account of my cousin Bridget- if you are not already surfeited with cousins and take you by the hand, if you are willing to go with us, on an excursion which we made a summer or two since, in search of more cousins,

Through the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire.

MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE.

BRIDGET ELIA has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations to Bridget, extending

We house together,

beyond the period of memory. old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits yet so, as "with a difference." We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings Our as it should be among near relations. sympathies are rather understood, than expressed; and once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and complained that I was altered. We are both great readers in different directions. While I am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, whereof our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teases me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must have a story well, ill, or indifferently told so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune in fiction- and almost in real life have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humors and opinionsheads with some diverting twist in them—the oddities of authorship please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of anything that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing goes down with her that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy. She "holds Nature more clever." I can pardon her blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Religio Medici; but she must apologize to me for certain disrespectful insinuations,

which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, touching the intellectuals of a dear favorite of mine, of the last century but one, the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous, but again somewhat fantastical, and original-brained, generous Margaret Newcastle.

It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have wished, to have had for her associates and mine, freethinkers, leaders, and disciples, of novel philosophies and systems; but she neither wrangles with, nor accepts their opinions. That which was good and venerable to her, when a child, retains its authority over her mind still. She never juggles or plays tricks with her understanding.

We are both of us inclined to be a little too positive; and I have observed the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly this, that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns out, that I was in the right, and my cousin in the wrong. But where we have differed upon moral points; upon something proper to be done, or let alone; whatever heat of opposition, or steadiness of conviction, I set out with, I am sure always, in the long-run, to be brought over to her way of thinking.

I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle hand, for Bridget does not like to be told of her faults. She hath an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of reading in company; at which times she will answer yes or no to a question, without fully understanding its purport, which is provoking, and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said question. Her presence of mind is equal to the most pressing trials of life, but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. When the