two young ladies, who are her next door neighbours, for a custom they have of lolling out of their windows and talking to fellows in the street: the charge cannot be denied, for it is certainly a practice, these young ladies indulge themselves in very freely; but on the other hand it must be owned Miss Pen Tabby is also in the habit of lolling out of her window at the same time to stare at them, and put them to shame for the levity of their conduct: they have also the crime proved upon them of being unpardonably handsome, and this they neither can nor will attempt to contradict. Miss Pen Tabby is extremely regular at morning prayers, but she complains heavily of a young staring fellow in the pew next to her own, who violates the solemnity of the service by ogling her at her devotions: he has a way of leaning over the pew, and dangling a white hand ornamented with a tiaming paste-ring, which sometimes plays the lights in her eyes, so as to make them water with the reflection, and Miss Pen has this very natural remark ever ready on the occasion- Such things, you know, are apt to take off one's attention.'

Another of this illustrious junto is Billy Bachelor, an old unmarried petit-maitre: Billy is a courtier of ancient standing; he abounds in anecdotes not of the freshest date, nor altogether of the most interesting sort; for he will tell you how such and such a lady was dressed, when he had the honour of handing her into the drawing-room: he has a court-atalantis of his own, from which he can favour you with some hints of sly doings amongst the maids of honour, particularly of a certain dubious duchess now deceased, (for he names no names) who appeared at a certain masquerade in puris naturalibus, and other valuable discoveries, which all the world has long ago known, and long ago been tired of. Billy has a

smattering in the fine arts, for he can net purses, and make admirable coffee, and write sonnets; he has the best receipt in nature for a dentifrice, which he makes up with his own hands, and gives to such ladies as are in his favour, and have an even row of teeth: he can boast some skill in music, for he plays Barberini's minuet to admiration, and accompanies the airs in the Beggar's Opera on his flute in their original taste: he is also a playhouse critic of no mean pretensions, for he remembers Mrs. Woffington, and Quin, and Mrs. Cibber; and when the players come to town, Billy is greatly looked up to, and has been known to lead a clap, where nobody but himself could find a reason for clapping at all. When his vanity is in the cue, Billy Bachelor can talk to you of his amours, and upon occasion stretch the truth to save his credit: particularly in accounting for a certain old lameness in his knee-pan, which some, who are in the secret, know was got by being kicked out of a coffee-house, but which to the world at large he asserts was incurred by leaping out of a window to save a lady's reputation, and escape the fury of an enraged husband,

Dr. Pyeball is a dignitary of the church, and a mighty proficient in the belles lettres: he tells you Voltaire was a man of some fancy and had a knack of writing, but he bids you beware of his principles, and doubts if he had any more christianity than Pontius Pilate: he has wrote an epigram against a certain contemporary historian, which cuts him up at a stroke. By a happy jargon of professional phrases, with a kind of Socratic mode of arguing, he has so bamboozled the dons of the cathedral as to have effected a tolal revolution in their church music, making Purcell, Crofts and Handel give place to a quaint, quirkish style, little Jess capricious than if the organist was to play co

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tillions, and the dean and chapter dance to them. The doctor is a mighty admirer of those ingenious publications, which are intitled The Flowers of the several authors they are selected from: this short cut to Parnassus not only saves him a great deal of round-about riding, but supplies him with many an apt couplet for off-hand quotations, in which he is very expert, and has besides a clever knack of wearing them into his pulpit essays (for I will not call them sermons) in much the same way as TiddyDoll stuck plums on his short pigs and his long pigs and his pigs with a curley tail.' By a proper sprinkling of these spiritual nosegays, and the recommendation of a soft insinuating address, doctor Pyeball is universally cried up as a very pretty genteel preacher, one who understands the politeness of the pulpit, and does not surfeit well-bred people with more religion than they have stomachs for. Amiable Miss Pen Tabby is one of the warmest admirers, and declares Doctor Pyeball in his gown and cassock is quite the man of fashion: the ill-natured world will have it she has contemplated him in other situations with equal approbation.

Elegant Mrs. Dainty is another ornament of this charming coterie: she is separated from her husband, but the eye of malice never spied a speck upon her virtue; his manners were insupportable, she, good lady, never gave him the least provocation, for she was always sick and mostly confined to her chamber in nursing a delicate constitution: noises racked her head, company shook her nerves all to pieces; in the country she could not live, for country doctors and apothecaries knew nothing of her case: in London she could not sleep, unless the whole street was littered with straw. Her husband was a man of no refinement; all the fine feelings of the human heart' were heathen Greek to him; he

loved his friend, had no quarrel with his bottle, and, coming from his club one night a little flustered, his horrid dalliances threw Mrs. Dainty into strong hysterics, and the covenanted truce being now broken, she kept no further terms with him, and they separated. It was a step of absolute necessity, for she declares her life could no otherwise have been saved; his boisterous familiarities would have been her death. She now leads an uncontaminated life, supporting a feeble frame by medicine, sipping her tea with her dear quiet friends, every evening, chatting over the little news of the day, sighing charitably when she hears any evil of her kind neighbours, turning off her femme-de-chambre once a week or thereabouts, fondling her lap-dog, who is a dear sweet pretty creature, and so sensible, and taking the air now and then on a pillion behind faithful John, who is so careful of her and so handy, and at the same time one of the stoutest, handsomest, best-limbed lads in all England.

Sir Hugo Fitz-Hugo is a decayed baronet of a family so very ancient, that they have long since worn out the estate that supported them: Sir Hugo knows his own dignity none the less, and keeps a little snivelling boy, who can scarce move under the load of worsted lace, that is plaistered down the edges and seams of his livery: he leaves a visiting card at your door, stuck as full of emblems as an American paper dollar. Sir Hugo abominates a tradesman; his olfactory nerves are tortured with the scent of a grocer, or a butcher quite across the way, and as for a tallow-chandler he can wind him to the very end of the street; these are people, whose visits he cannot endure; their very bills turn his stomach upside down. Sir Hugo inveighs against modern manners as severely as Cato would against French cookery; he notes down omissions

in punctilio as a merchant does bills for protesting: and in cold weather Sir IIugo is of some use, for he suffers no man to turn his back to the fire and screen it from the company who sit round: he holds it for a solecism in good-breeding for any man to touch a lady's hand without his glove: this as a general maxim Miss Pen Tabby agrees to, but doubts whether there are not some cases when it may be waved: he anathematizes the heresy of a gentleman's sitting at the head of a lady's table, and contends that the honours of the upper dish are the unalienable rights of the mistress of the family: in short, Sir Hugo Fitz-Hugo has more pride about him than he knows how to dispose of, and yet cannot find in his heart to bestow one atom of it upon honesty from the world he merits no other praise but that of having lived single all his life, and being the last of his family; at his decease the FitzHugos will be extinct.

This society may also boast a tenth muse in the person of the celebrated Rhodope: her talents are multifarious poetical, biograghical, epistolary,miscellaneous she can reason like Socrates, dispute like Aristotle and love like Sappho ; her magnanimity equals that of Marc Antony, for when the world was at his feet, he sacrificed it all for love, and accounted it well lost. She was a philosopher in her leading-strings, and had travelled geographically over the globe ere she could set one foot fairly before the other: her cradle was rocked to the Iambic measure, and she was lulled to sleep by singing to her an ode of Horace. Rhodope has written a book of travels full of most enchanting incidents, which some of her admirers say was actually sketched in the nursery, and only filled up with little temporary touches in her riper years: I know they make appeal to her style as internal evidence of what they assert