"Pray, sir," asked Mr. Aspic, sourly, "don't you hang-up for a wit ?”

toe.

St. Leger most coolly surveyed him from tip to

"Because," said Aspic, "you might like to be aware that I've already perused Scarron and Joe Miller."

This gentleman's personal exterior by no means detracted from the smartingness of his satire, or his temper's petulance. His attenuated, almost emaciated, trunk was propped upon spindles, hyperbolically denominated legs, and sometimes (synechdocally) shanks: his physiognomy was sallow, meagre, sharply-expressive, and curiously wrinkled with his sable apparel his flesh's hue had the happiest keeping: grizzly was his beard -his whiskers scant-and the pointed effect produced from reddish-grey optics forcibly strengthened by a topin (vulgò cow's-lick), surmounting the skin-crimpt forehead of this legitimate scion from the prolific Ishmael.

:

"And pray," said St. Leger, jocosely, "are you equally at home in Fairy Tales ?"

A puzzled frown.

"To furnish us the posterity of that

pleasant, little, conceited fellow-Riquet with the

Tuft."

"What-what," began Aspic, tartly

"But," interposed Villiers, "this Nihill-his literary attainments should be slight ?"

"The sole poem he ever read-and then, avowedly, as a preparative to France-was Goldsmith's Traveller: and he since supplicated me to avise him if the Sentimental Journey' found sequel in 'A Journey from this world to the next!""

"Fye! thrice-slaying the slain.'-But how does the uncle escape comment? for, doubtless, Brompton was, in his own way

"Brompton ?" iterated Aspic :

know something of him."

"I should

"What, may I beg ?" said St. Leger, expectively.

"Nothing, sir, worthy relating to one fixed on -such dignifying pursuits as you."

Berkeley quizzed him through his Dolland, as if examining a specimen of Otaheitan ornithology. "Without question," cried Villiers-to avert Aspic's pettishness-"it was a family of originals."

"Brompton, at least," rejoined he of Sapperton, "was of particular nous. Having somewhere

or other understood, from some one or other, that the proper study of mankind was man-adjourned regularly after breakfast to Bow-Street Police-Office, he composedly sat-out the proceedings; plodded homewards, and pored over antique Army-Lists-which he termed 'consoling himself' (his father having been Drum-Major for thirty years) until dinner; till tea, sprawled in an armchair of immemorial construction, directly fronting the portrait of his latest wife (for he had married four). Having had the likeness of the earliest limned, he felt, on espousing the second, he could do no less for her; but, much addicted to parsimony, and arguing that the same canvas might answer both, he merely got the new face painted over the spot tenanted hitherto by the former; put the same plan in requisition with the third; and his fourth was anomalously exhibited, a junior face, decked in the faded robes of more than halfa-century before."

St. Leger evidently enjoyed Aspic. "Blame not the bard," he cried, "for confederating with the descendant of such an ancestor-the ultimus Romanorum, the last of the Wrongheads !-blame rather the adoptors of the motto, 'Nihil a me alienum puto!"

VOL. I.

"Brompton"-continued Aspic, unregardful of St. Leger-"his tea finished, spelt backwards and forwards the pages of the Newgate Calendar; drained two tumblers of rum-punch; wound his watch with the first, and prorogued to bed precisely as the final stroke of ten was sounding;congratulating himself on the insight he was diurnally acquiring into that store-house of abstruseness and vagabondism-the male and female mind!"

No. 3.-Contains "sanctified doings-with a witness."

His manè edictum, post prandia Callirhoën do.

PERS.

B's "Le puits d' Amour" was in the course of composition. St. Leger had tickets to a private performance. Villiers was to submit to his "safe conduct" on this, he pledging himself to "follow the leader" on another, day.

They dined at Vefour's: thence proceeded to the Opéra-Comique: and, the curtain falling— "Now," said Berkeley, "for Ma'm'selle Baudry!" wherewith he turned to the Rue St. Honoré.

That afternoon, however, had sufficiently convinced Villiers of the Oxonian's recklessness being as greatly assumed as it undisguisedly was gloried-in. At Vefour's, apart from his cordon of criticising satellites, laying-by the exercise of flippancy, he showed himself master of a clear judgment-treating philosophy with a soundness which evinced conversant application-and, in literature, luminously flying from topic to topic, eliciting novelty from each. But in libertinism he was supereminent-referring everything to the Senses, and seeming even to revel above the ruins of his peace and his health's dilapidation. Yet a shade of regret, or grief, rather perceptible than permitted, would steal-in, affixing more a wildness than a gloom. It was this that retained Villiers to him subsequently-this promise-ground of ultimate retrieval-in the midst of no small indignation, that he should thus have transmuted: that, so endowed with talent, wealth, and erudition, he should debase himself in debauchery,