domestic to you as your good cat or household bird; the visitant is your fly, that flaps in at your window, and out again, leaving nothing but a sense of disturbance, and victuals spoiled. The inferior functions of life begin to move heavily. We cannot concoct our food with interruptions. Our chief meal, to be nutritive, must be solitary. With difficulty we can eat before a guest; and never understood what the relish of public feasting meant. Meats have no sapor, nor digestion fair play, in a crowd. The unexpected coming in of a visitant stops the machine. There is a punctual generation who time their calls to the precise commencement of your dining-hour -not to eat but to see you eat. Our knife and fork drop instinctively, and we feel that we have swallowed our latest morsel. Others again show their genius, as we have said, in knocking the moment you have just sat down to a book. They have a peculiar compassionate sneer, with which they "hope that they do not interrupt your studies." Though they flutter off the next moment, to carry their impertinences to the nearest student that they can call their friend, the tone of the book is spoiled; we shut the leaves, and, with Dante's lovers, read no more that day. It were well if the effect of intrusion were simply coextensive with its presence; but it mars all the good hours afterward. These scratches in appearance leave an orifice that closes not hastily. "It is a prostitution of the bravery of friendship," says worthy Bishop Taylor, "to spend it upon impertinent people, who are, it may be, loads to their families, but can never ease my loads." This is the secret of their gaddings, their visits, and morning calls. They too have homes, which are-no homes.

XIII.

THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME, AND LOVE MY DOG.

"GooD sir, or madam, as it may be-we most willingly embrace the offer of your friendship. We long have known your excellent qualities. We have wished to have you nearer to us; to hold you within the very innermost fold of our heart. We can have no reserve towards a person of your open and noble nature. The frankness of your humour suits us exactly. We have been long looking for such a friend. Quicklet us disburden our troubles into each other's bosom-let us

make our single joys shine by reduplication-But yap, yap, yap!-what is this confounded cur? he has fastened his tooth, which is none of the bluntest, just in the fleshy part of my leg."

"It is my dog, sir. You must love him for my sake. Here, Test-Test-Test!"

"But he has bitten me."

"Ay, that he is apt to do, till you are better acquainted with him. I have had him three years. He never bites me." Yap, yap, yap !—"He is at it again."

"Oh, sir, you must not kick him. He does not like to be kicked. I expect my dog to be treated with all the respect due to myself."

"But do you always take him out with you when you go a friendship-hunting?"

"Invariably. "Tis the sweetest, prettiest, best-conditioned animal. I call him my test-the touchstone by which I try a friend. No one can properly be said to love me who does not love him.”

"Excuse us, dear sir—or madam aforesaid-if upon further consideration we are obliged to decline the otherwise invaluable offer of your friendship. We do not like dogs."

"Mighty well, sir-you know the conditions-you may have worse offers. Come along, Test."

The above dialogue is not so imaginary, but that, in the intercourse of life, we have had frequent occasions of breaking off an agreeable intimacy by reason of these canine appendages. They do not always come in the shape of dogs; they sometimes wear the more plausible and human character of kinsfolk, near acquaintances, my friend's friend, his partner, his wife, or his children. We could never yet form a friendship-not to speak of more delicate correspondence-however much to our taste, without the intervention of some third anomaly, some impertinent clog affixed to the relation-the understood dog in the proverb. The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture; like a school boy's holyday, with a task affixed to the tail of it. What a delightful companion is * * * *, if he did not always bring his tall cousin with him! He seems to grow with him; like some of those double births, which we remember to have read of with such wonder and delight in the old "Athenian Oracle," where Swift commenced author by writing Pindaric Odes (what a beginning for him!) upon Sir William Temple. There is the picture of the brother, with the little brother peeping out at his shoulder; a species of fraternity which we have no name of kin close enough to

comprehend. When comes, poking in his head and shoulder into your room, as if to feel his entry, you think, surely you have now got him to yourself-what a three-hours' chat we shall have !-but, ever in the haunch of him, and be fore his diffident body is well disclosed in your apartment, ap pears the haunting shadow of the cousin, over-peering his modest kinsman, and sure to overlay the expected good talk with his insufferable procerity of stature, and uncorresponding dwarfishness of observation. Misfortunes seldom come alone. "Tis hard when a blessing comes accompanied. Cannot we like Sempronia, without sitting down to chess with her eternal brother? or know Sulpicia, without knowing all the round of her card-playing relations? must my friend's brethren of necessity be mine also? must we be hand and glove with Dick Selby the parson, or Jack Selby the calico-printer, because W. S., who is neither, but a ripe wit and a critic, has the misfortune to claim a common parentage with them? Let him lay down his brothers; and 'tis odds but we will cast him in a pair of ours (we have a superflux) to balance the concession. Let F. H. lay down his garrulous uncle; and Honorius dismiss his vapid wife, and superfluous establishment of six boys: things between boy and manhood-too ripe for play, too raw for conversation-that come in, impudently staring their father's old friend out of countenance; and will neither aid nor let alone the conference: that we may once more meet upon equal terms, as we were wont to do in the disengaged state of bachelorhood.

It is well if your friend or mistress be content with these canicular probations. Few young ladies but in this sense keep a dog. But when Rutilia hounds at you her tiger aunt; or Ruspina expects you to cherish and fondle her viper sister, whom she has preposterously taken into her bosom, to try stinging conclusions upon your constancy; they must not complain if the house be rather thin of suiters. Scylla must have broken off many excellent matches in her time, if she insisted upon all that loved her loving her dogs also.

An excellent story to this moral is told of Merry, of Della Cruscan memory. In tender youth, he loved and courted a modest appanage to the opera, in truth a dancer, who had won him by the artless contrast between her manners and situation. She seemed to him a native violet, that had been transplanted by some rude accident into that exotic and artificial hotbed. Nor, in truth, was she less genuine and sincere than she appeared to him. He wooed and won this flower. Only for appearance' sake, and for due honour to the bride's relations, she craved that she might have the attendance of

her friends and kindred at the approaching solemnity. The request was too amiable not to be conceded: and in this solicitude for conciliating the good-will of mere relations, he found a presage of her superior attentions to himself, when the golden shaft should have "killed the flock of all affections else." The morning came and at the Star and Garter, Richmond-the place appointed for the breakfasting-accompanied with one English friend, he impatiently awaited what re-enforcements the bride should bring to grace the ceremony. A rich muster she had made. They came in six coachesthe whole corps du ballet-French, Italian, men and women. Monsieur De B., the famous pirouetter of the day, led his fair spouse, but craggy, from the banks of the Seine. The prima donna had sent her excuse. But the first and second buffa were there; and Signor Sc-, and Signora Ch--, and Madame V—, with a countless cavalcade besides of chorusers, figurantes, at the sight of whom Merry afterward declared, that "then for the first time it struck him seriously that he was about to marry-a dancer." But there was no help for it. Besides, it was her day; these were, in fact, her friends and kinsfolk. The assemblage, though whimsical, was all very natural. But when the bride-handing out of the last coach a still more extraordinary figure than the rest-presented to him as her father-the gentleman that was to give her away— no less a person than Signor Delpini himself—with a sort of pride, as much as to say, See what I have brought to do us honour!-the thought of so extraordinary a paternity quite overcame him; and slipping away under some pretence from the bride and her motley adherents, poor Merry took horse from the back yard to the nearest seacoast, from which, shipping himself to America, he shortly after consoled himself with a more congenial match in the person of Miss Brunton; relieved from his intended clown father, and a bevy of painted buffas for bridemaids.

XIV.

THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK.

AT what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his night-gear, and prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not naturalists enough to determine. But for a mere

human gentleman-that has no orchestra business to call him from his warm bed to such preposterous exercises--we take ten, or half after ten, (eleven, of course, during this Christmas solstice,) to be the very earliest hour at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think of it, we say; for to do it in earnest requires another half hour's good consideration. Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told, and such like gauds, abroad in the world, in summer time especially, some hours before what we have assigned; which a gentleman may see, as they say, only for getting up. But, having been tempted once or twice, in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, we confess our curiosity abated. We are no longer ambitious of being the sun's courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours of the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances; which have in them, besides, something pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun, (as 'tis called,) to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and sleepless traveller. We deny not that there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these breakof-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of a lazy world; to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually in strange qualms, before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion. Therefore, while the busy part of mankindare fast huddling on their clothes, are already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale; we choose to linger abed, and digest our dreams It is the very time to recombine the wandering images, which night in a confused mass presented; to snatch them from forgetfulness; to shape and mould them. Some people have no good of their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly, to taste them curiously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to drag into daylight a struggling and half-vanishing nightmare; to handle and examine the terrors, or the airy solaces. We have too much respect for these spiritual communications to let them go so lightly. We are not so stupid, or so careless, as that imperial forgetter of his dreams, that we should need a seer to remind us of the form of them. They seem to us to have as much significance as