been afforded no other criterion, and he began to think that the more elevated class with whom

he was destined to associate, unless he preferred absolute solitude, supplied but sorry substitutes for his old cronies in the City, who had for so many years discussed with him, over a pipe at Jonathan's, the latest news, the contents of the Weekly Courant, the prices of Baltic produce, and the truculent plots of the Papists. In hoping to escape from his terrors upon the latter subject, by sequestering himself from their presumed focus, the metropolis, he had been woefully disappointed, for the dread of those omnipresent but invisible assassins, was a national delirium, which equally maddened every hamlet in the empire. Unfortunately for Isaac's peace of mind, his vicinity to the sea brought him in contact with marauders and smugglers, whose occasional signals and skirmishes were invariably attributed to a descent from the Irish, coming to ravage the country with fire and sword; and although his Protestant flail, and his silken panoply afforded him some little consolation, he remembered, with much trepidation of spirit, that in the hour of

need he could neither pop his head out of the window and call the watch, nor send one of his clerks to give information to the Lord Mayor, as he might have done in the City.

The country, in short, after the bustle of his settlement had a little subsided, no longer appeared to him so fine an invention as he had first pronounced it, and there was something so oppressive and even alarming in the dead breathless silence of the night, when he happened to be awake, that he longed for the bawling of the watchmen, the rattling of wheels, and the punctual chimes of the Royal Exchange clock. There was really no sleeping comfortably without some noise or other: the idea that all the world round about him was buried in deep repose, seemed to leave him in such a forlorn and unprotected plight that he could not close his eyes. Nor did the days offer him such an uninterrupted succession of tranquil delights as he had fondly anticipated.

Although his neighbours gradually began to thaw from their frozen etiquette, as the ridicu Jous rumour about his unsavoury business was

refuted, and his commercial respectability fully established; and although several families of some distinction found a pleasure in calling upon him when they were absolutely at fault what else to do, yet Goldingham now and then found himself terribly at a loss to get through the day, especially if it happened to be a rainy one. He felt that a man who has been for many years engaged in active absorbing pursuits, and conversant with busy bustling faces, finds nothing so difficult to do as to do nothing, and no company more irksome to be restricted to than his own. Idleness, in fact, requires a regular apprenticeship, and is seldom well performed, except by those who are born and bred to the business. - Adzooks!" he exclaimed one day, as he soliloquised up and down his gravel walk, "when one has stood upon 'Change, talked to brokers, and made one or two hundred pounds of a morning, it is bad enough to sit in a sunny field, prattle to buttercups and daffodils, and get nothing after all but a cold. But what am I to do in the winter? when my neighbours are all shooting away Time

with their fowling pieces, or hunting him down with dogs and horses?—I can't perch upon a gate and whistle like a blackbird, nor hop about looking for crumbs like a robin redbreast, nor squat down in the fern like a hare, nor stand in the snow chewing the cud, like a cow, nor go to bed like a dormouse, and tell Timothy to call me next spring. Oh! for a sleety morning at Christmas! give me the fire-side corner at Jonathan's, with a fresh pipe, a pint of mull'd lamb's wool, and the Weekly Courant. Green lanes are certainly very pretty things, but one sadly misses the foot-pavement, and the shops on each side, and the lamps; you can't hold up your finger for a hackney-coach if caught in a shower, nor call the watch and spring half a dozen rattles in as many minutes, if any one threatens to assault you. For the summer the country may be a very ingenious contrivance; but I shall never be able to get through the winter here, unless I have somebody to talk to besides Mrs. Holmes and Timothy. Adzooks! I don't know which is the worst of the two, the one always smiling and curtsying, and saying "Yes, Sir,

certainly," before I have ever opened my lips, though I hear her scolding like a shrew the moment she quits the parlour; and the other a saucy, superannuated old fool, who fancies himself a wag, and whom I shall send about his business the moment I can supply his place.→ Talk of the country, indeed! I should like to know where there is such society as at the Exchange, such a garden as the Stocks' market, such ponds and decoys as in Leadenhall, such parks for venison, without going a-hunting, as in the cooks' shops in East Cheap. What I have in the country they tell me is my own; so is that in London, so long as I have got money to buy it. I wish Jemmy Tibbs the scrivener, or Bat Hobson of the Russia Walk, would just run down for a month or two when the bad weather first sets in."

Just as he finished this desponding soliloquy, Timothy came to announce to him that the little grey pony, which he had purchased with the other effects of the late General, was eating its head off in the stable, and falling ill for want of exercise; declaring at the same time, in answer