hearth-rug; and should its front teeth meet in their forefinger, will, for an additional trifle, exclaim, "Pretty little fellow! I don't wonder he 's such a favourite." Messrs. Clack and Caterer are also provided with two unbeneficed clergymen, who have guaranteed a short grace, and undertake not to eat of the second course. These gentlemen tell a choice collection of good jokes, with a rigid abstinence from Joe Miller. They have various common-places at hand, which they can throw in when conversation flags. The one of them remarks that London begins to look dull in September, and that Waterloo-place is a great improvement; and the other observes, that Elliston has much beautified Drury-lane, 'and that Kean's voice is apt to fail him in the fifth act. This kind of talk is not brilliant, but it wears well, and never provokes animosity. Messrs. Clack and Caterer beg also to acquaint the nobility and gentry, that they have laid in a couple of quadrillers and three pair of parasites; who take children upon their knees in spite of tamarinds and Guava jelly; cut turbot into choice parallelograms; pat plain children on the head, and assure their mamma that their hair is not red but auburn; never meddle with the two long-necked bottles on the table; address half of their conversation to the lady of the house, and the other half to any deaf gentleman on their other side, who tilts his ear in the hollow of his hand. Should either of these personages be so far forgetful of his duty as to contradict a county member, introduce agricultural distress, or prove the cause of the present low prices; wonder what happened at Verona, or who wrote the Scotch novels; gentlemen are requested to write "bore" upon his back with a piece of chalk (which the butler had better be provided with), and then to return the offender to the advertisers, when the money will be paid back, deducting coachhire. Cheap goods rarely turn out well. Some dinner-giving gentlemen have hired diners out at an inferior price; and what was lately the consequence at a Baronet's in Portland-place?—A Birmingham article of this sort entered the drawing-room with a hackney straw adhering to one stocking, and a pedicular ladder ascending the other. He drank twice of champagne; called for beer; had never heard that the opera opened without Angrisani; wondered why Miss Paton and Braham did not sing together (forgetting that all Great Russell-street and a part of the Piazza yawned between them); spilt red wine on the tablecloth, and tried to rectify the error by a smear of salt and Madeira; left the fish-cruets as bare as the pitchers of the Belides; and committed various other errors, which Messrs. Clack and Caterer scorn to enumerate. All this proceeds from not going to the best shops and paying accordingly. Messrs. Clack and Caterer beg likewise to acquaint a liberal and candid public, that they have an unexceptionable assortment of threeday visitors, who go by the stage to villas from Saturday to Monday. These out-of-towners know all about Webb Hall and the drill-plough : take a hand at whist; never beat their host at billiards; have no objection to go to church; and are ready to look at improvements on being provided with thick shoes. If up hill, or through a copse of the party's own planting, a small additional sum will be required. For further particulars enquire at the warehouse in Leicester-square. If Messrs. Clack and Caterer give satisfaction, it is all they require; money is no object. Letters, post-paid, will be duly attended to. ON MORELLI*. HE was the first that for fair Italy They will'd it not, and the enchainers came They chained him first upon their dungeon-floor, Slave of the slaves, who, down into thy land It bursts at last to deluge thee in ill !’— * Ce jeune homme, Morelli, osait aspirer à une grande renommé. Il osa seul avec cent vingt cheveaux de son régiment commencer cette révolution qui donna pour peu de temps la liberté à sa patrie." "Quand tout fût perdu, Morelli, tacha de se retrancher dans les défiles de Monteforte, où la révolution avait éclaté. Mais le gouvernement avait déjà tout cédé à l'ennemi." "Ce jeune sous-lieutenant fut le seul officier qui osa tenter par lui-même une résistance nationale quand les officiers supérieurs quittaient le pays de tout côté." THE TANNER'S WIDOW. Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn'd, Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com'st in such a questionable shape, That I will speak to thee. HAMLET. MR. and Mrs. Pitman would have been the best assorted and happiest couple in all Leighton-Buzzard,-in fact, they might have successfully claimed the Dunmow flitch of bacon,-but for certain natural differences of temper, habits, and pursuits; and their perpetual squabbles on the subject of dress, housekeeping, amusements, and all that regarded pecuniary disbursements. He stoutly determined not to die a beggar, she as sturdily declared that she would not live like one, and both kept their words. It certainly did not become a thriving tanner's wife, as she very justly observed, to go draggling about in rags and rubbish; but then it was equally unseemly, as he very pertinently rejoined, to flaunt through the town in scarlet velvet pelisses that set all the place in a blaze, and wear such a variety of plumecrowned bonnets, that more people went to church to look at her single head, than to mark the three into which the clergyman regularly divided his Cerberus sermons. Whether this was the fault of the lady, the congregation, or the Reverend Mr. Snuffleton, he did not presume to decide, but all those who were poorer than Mr. Pitman joined in condemning his wife's extravagance, while all those who were richer contented themselves with laughing at it. Certain it is, that she introduced unheard-of luxuries among the good tradespeople of Leighton-Buzzard. She it was who first put a livery upon one of the apprentices, and made him wait at table when there was company, to the great clamour of the whole town and tan-yard; and she it was who first placed before her guests gooseberry wine ennobled with the title of Champagne, which being in lank narrow-shouldered bottles, well sealed down and secured at the mouth, and very sparkling, frothy and vapid, when it found vent, might well have passed off, even with travellers, as a genuine native of France. The neighbours who came eagerly to taste this rarity, were quite as eager when they went away to abuse the donor; and Mr. Pitman, anxious for his double credit as a manufacturer of gooseberry-wine and a frugal tanner, burnt with impatience to reveal the secret; but his wife having sworn that she would order a new velvet pelisse from Bond-street the moment he divulged, he kept his tongue between his teeth and his money in his pocket. To do this the more effectually, he had repeatedly declared to the tradespeople that he would not pay one farthing of his wife's extravagant debts; and he was a man of such firmness and decision of character that Mrs. Pitman was constantly obliged to go to him, and insist upon having the money immediately that she might discharge them herself. The gravedigger in Hamlet assures us that a tanner will considerably outlast others under ground: though they should not therefore outlive their fellows upon earth, they may consider themselves gainers in the long run. There is no quarrelling about tastes, but for my own part I would rather be a lively young man, than a mummy, however old. Mr. Pitman might have made the same decision, had a choice been afforded him, but it was not. He quitted us all without notice, evaporating as it were, without any visible motive for becoming invisible; and when I enquired the particulars of my friend the schoolmaster at Leighton-Buzzard, he could only exclaim in the words of Cicero, "Abiit-evasit-excessit-erupit !" Mrs. Pitman was as inconsolable as bombazeen could make her;her cap was a perfect pattern of grief, and nobody could have suspected her of laughing in her sleeve when they saw the depth of its weepers. And yet as a lover of expense, and not of her husband, she might well have been justified in some ebullition of pleasant surprise, when she found that owing to a prize in the Lottery, which he had kept a secret, and certain usurious transactions which he had no great temptation to reveal, he had left her one of the richest widows in the whole neighbourhood. Her acquaintance, with their usual determination to make others share their own envy, or at all events to excite astonishment, instantly doubled the amount of her fortune, which rumour soon tripled and quadrupled, until, upon the authority of some friends and connexions who " happened to know the fact," it was finally and accurately set down at only three times the real amount. we shall have fine doings," cried the good gossips of Leighton-Buzzard —“a rare dashing coach, and liveries of light blue and scarlet, I warrant me, with as many plumes in the head as her husband had at his funeral, (which was, after all, a scandalous shabby one,) and as fine rings upon her finger as if she were a lady mayoress. Ay, ay, Madam Pitman is a proper one to make the money fly." " Now Now with all proper deference to these good gossips I am inclined to think that a sudden accession of unexpected wealth is just as likely to make a niggard as a spendthrift. C'est le premier pas qui coute in hoarding; the difficulty is to make a beginning worthy of your future efforts to increase it. What can a person do with a few pounds? It is too little to put in the stocks, or buy a house; it is even dangerous to keep in your house; you must spend it in your own defence. Such is our treatment of small sums, large ones seldom pay us a visit, and the consequence is that few people in common life save money. Let a foundation be once laid, and we feel such a pride and pleasure in building up our fortune that we rarely abandon the enterprise. who have felt the difficulty of acquiring, and the gratification of possessing property, ever fall into extravagance. This is the great merit of the Saving Banks; they form a nucleus for the humblest ambition, and are sure to become powerful stimulants of frugal and moral habits. Whether they were not rather meant as political engines for attaching the lower orders to existing establishments, in which way they may involve the maintenance of all existing abuses, is a point, which, if it were ever so learnedly argued, would not, I apprehend, help us very forward with our story of the Tanner's Widow. Few The fact is, that Mrs. Pitman no sooner felt the dignity of wealth, the consequence of possession, and the pleasure of the homage which they procure, than she very naturally concluded, that her dignity, consequence, and pleasure, would increase with the accumulation of her riches; and began economizing with great vigour and perseverance. No more fine pelisses and bonnets; these were very well to procure her the reputation of affluence; she now had the reality, and rather affected shabbiness of attire, not so much from parsimony, as to excite attention by the contrast of her present with her former self, and so recall the cause of the change. Though the habit of frugality finally stole upon her, so far as to degenerate into penuriousness, and procure for her the appellation of the old female miser, she could at times emancipate herself from its influence. As it was said of a certain bard that he threw about his dung with an air of dignity, it might be affirmed of her, that there was sometimes a magnificence in her meanness. She contributed largely to public subscriptions; made handsome donations to the parish; and frequently gave fifty pounds at a time to her nephew Frank Millington, though it was never known that they did him any good, or relieved him in the smallest degree from his embarrassments. These violent efforts were, however, always succeeded by silent repentance, and an effort to reconcile herself to her habits by a stricter domestic economy. Then were the poor maids condemned for three days together to witness the apparition of the same calf's head upon the dinner-table; and when at last they laid it in the Red Sea, they not infrequently imported a red herring in exchange. The French restaurateurs who give dinners at twenty-five sous a head, pompously announce in their bills, " Pain à discretion," well knowing that no person of the least discretion will eat much of so sour a commodity; and Mrs. Pitman informed her nymphs, that she left the small beer to their free and uncontrolled disposal, though she must confess she abominated female tipplers. It was magnifying things to give such a pigmy beverage, innocent of hops and scarcely tinged with the first blush of malt, the name of even small beer; but the same cause that made Mrs. Pitman lavish, made the liquor poor. It was always sent as a present from her cousin Mr. Swipes the brewer, who was trying by every art and attention to ingratiate himself with the old lady's will, and who, knowing that she never tasted any thing but currant wine, or rather water, of her own concoction, sometimes fobbed off her servants with a returned cask, whose acidity he had partially disguised by fortifying it from the pump. Probably he extended to unpaid beer, the proverb applied to a gift horse-that it should not be looked at in the mouth all the world agreed that it was "dull, flat, and stale," and he was the only person not justified in calling it "unprofitable."-But enough of this compound; we must not speak ill of the dead. Mr. Currie, the saddler, another cousin, who had also a shrewd eye to the "post mortem appearances" of the widow's testament, and could not very appropriately ingratiate himself by a spur or a horsewhip, kept her supplied with other equally stimulating presents of sausages, hams, fish, poultry, and game; chuckling at the idea of the enormous usury at which he was putting them out, which he estimated in his own mind at about the rate of a hundred pounds a basket. Mr. Swipes was neither less liberal, nor less sanguine; scarcely a week elapsed without his despatching a savoury parcel, which he deemed equivalent to sowing legacies and planting codicils. Nor had they any reason to doubt the old lady's intentions, for, as they fed her with good things, she fed them with hope, which is a better; and as to her nephew Frank Millington, against whom they combined all |