made a parting plunge at it, brought away a handful, and in a moment was in custody. The boy-mob then followed him, and not the truck, for all its charms were gone; and there the scene was ended.

A few words more. It is painful to reflect that no incident, however interesting to humanity, and innocent in itself, can occur in this immense and immensely immoral city, but its white enjoyment is dashed with some alloy of black depravity: that there is always some bad spirit, in waiting, ready and ever willing to take advantage of the incapable, the unwary, and the innocent, and turn them to their own nefarious account. I have mentioned Mr. Isaac Digby Datchet Nobbs as looking on with such a commendable curiosity at the scene, and really understanding and enjoying it. I lost some part of the humour of it in watching him-his susceptibility, his anxiety to see and be seen, his irritability at anything like vulgar contact, were so amusing and instructive to me. A good-sized sweep sought to be so far familiar with him as to make a few moral reflections upon the passing scene: Nobbs looked at him disdainfully from top to toe-saw, I suppose, that he was sooty from toe to top-and scornfully muttering "Fellow!" refused "the benefit of clargy." This was very weak and wicked on the part of Mr. Digby Nobbs, but he is a very up-ish young

feeling of reverence and regret. Here the witcombats, which Fuller speaks of in his book of Worthies, took place. Describing these, he says, "Many were the wit-combats between Shakspeare and Ben Jonson. I behold them, like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning-solid, but slow in his performances: Shakspeare, like the latter, less in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness. of his wit and invention." Who that now sips his claret at Crockford's would not prefer to have dropt in at the Mermaid in Cornhill, where these brave battles of the brain were fought, and where the quaint and humorous old Ben, forgetting all rivalry with the simple-hearted and unambitious Shakspeare, kept his table-roarers about him, as long as butts would flow, and life would let him, trolling his fine old rough-flavoured songs with a tongue sweet and smooth with canary or sherris sack?

What was said of Herrick will apply without alteration to his friend Ben :— "Our poet seems to have been gifted with no small portion of the conviviality and propensity of that bon-vivant, Falstaff. His relish for sack he records himself in pretty marked characters: whether, like the face

heel was hit, all "the conceit was taken out of him" he was plain, unadulterated Nobbs again— his swagger and pretension were all gone! A game cock who had just had his spurs cut could not have looked more crest-fallen. I may do Jones an injustice-but give a Jones an ill name, and hang him: it might not have been him. Was it any indiscreet member or officer of the Animals' Friend Society who was guilty of this abduction of dear Mr. Nobbs's spurs, out of an over-excess of tenderness for horse-flesh? They never were more in error in their humanity: for I do not hesitate to assert that their rowels were as innocent of horse-hurting as this pen! The utmost harm they ever did since they were spurs was tearing a Turkey carpet and a lady's Cachemere shawl. Poor Nobbs! knowing all this, no wonder he took on so, and was so utterly inconsolable. Lord Frederick, like the friend he is, "My dear Nobbs"-ed him perpetually, but all to no purpose he could not make him forget that he had lost his first pair of spurs-his metronomes, measuring the time of his steps! He felt he could not walk the streets without the timeful, tuneful accompaniment of their clink, clink, clink over the stones! Even the stones of the Clink Liberty would not now "prate of his whereabout" if he dared venture thereupon. His spurs-those spurs, like a Knight's of St. George, had made him a

gentleman and a foot-cavalier-had un-Thamesstreet-ed him, and dusted off all the drysalter from his City soul. How could he lose them so dishonourably, and not feel somewhat like a disgraced Knight, who had had them hacked off from his heels? To have them unscrewed from his Hobys was as unbearable a thought! I did not wonder-did not I-I was too much alive to his feelings at his excitement first, and his paralyzed state of helplessness afterwards! I marvelled not that his legs refused to "go off the stand" without those regulators and timists of their steps. They did try to go, but ineffectually : they were plainly put out-confused, confounded, and could not keep time without them! They began to shamble, and slip, and slide about, just as they used to misbehave themselves in Thames-street, and up and down Addle-hill, when they had no pretensions to be anything more than a decent pair of mercantile legs, top-booted, but never spurred, and now and then indulged with pumps, silk stockings, and a country-dance at Christmas and at Clapham. They could not easily forget that they had since learned to quadrille, and to galop, and to strut about the West End with Lord Frederick Fitznobody. I really felt for the legs, and for their incompetent governor, poor, crest-fallen, down-fallen Isaac Digby Datchet Nobbs ? Lord

Frederick saw the pitiable state his friend was in, and exerted himself to hold up his hand and beckon a cab to come to his assistance. His signal of distress was answered-one of those vehicles which are like nothing vehicular, saving and excepting a carboy with flat sides—or a big doctor's bottle, with a driver at the top for a stopper-or just enough of omnibus for two-one of those abortions drew up, and the debilitated Nobbs was got into it, and taken away somewhere, but whether to St. George's Hospital, or to Crockford's, I cannot say.

Poor Nobbs !-after all, he looked not so happy as even the unhappy Sampson Simpson, or ragged Pat, in much less harmful custody. "To each his own." Poor Simpson and poor Patrick are, I am thinking, better boys, both of them, than Isaac Digby Datchet Nobbs, Esquire ? I can foretel, indeed, that Sampson will gradually rise to the dignity and trust of keeping a chandler's shop (set up by his old masters, out of gratitude for past services); and that Pat, with seven children, will be one of his worst customers while Nobbs -whose double-barrelled gun (what with its expensive pigeon-shooting at the Red House, and its introducing him to the dangerous friendship of Lord F. Fitznobody) has already made him a double-barrelled fool-will be, long before that