We are indignant with Miller for having troubled | about whom you inquire; nor have I been in Ireland "the superb lump of flesh," as Sidney Smith calls for more than a year from the present date. her, with a second application; but so it was, and here is the result.

Mr. P. thinks it probable that it may have been meant for another person of his name; and if he SIR,-There must be some mistake, certainlycan learn that there is such a person in Bedford no such person as William Roberts was ever in my Square, he will forward the letter to him. If, how-service for any considerable space of time, for the ever, Mr. Proctor should be the person meant, (which name sounds altogether new to my ear. he does not think likely,) he will answer Mr. Miller's letter immediately, if Mr. Miller will explain the object of it by another communication.

SIR,-I have no knowledge of Murphy Delany, rejoiced to see our old friend in as good company

eloquent is courteous and philosophical as ever. The unknown person to whom he writes is addressed as "Dear Sir ;" and a metaphysical dis

as ever. The letter to Miller is franked by Sir C. M. Sutton, and the answer is directed to be sent under cover to the duke. This is as it should be. We like, too, the aversion of Holmes to contrib-tinction between knowledge and power is shadowed uting to the post-office-economy is the life of the half-pays; and the cautious and formal manner in which he prefixes the style of "His Grace" to the Duke of Wellington, proves that official habits have not left him with office. It is pleasant to perceive the old whipper-in concludes his signature with a flourish exactly like a thong-whip.

Dover, Oct. 7, 183-. SIR, I have received your letter inquiring about Robert Jukes. Though the name sounds on my ear as a person I have known, still I cannot bring it to my recollection when or where. If Robert Jukes will write to me, he probably will be enabled to draw my attention to the particular period which he Tell him to direct, under cover, to His Grace the Duke of Wellington, Walmer Castle, near Deal, where I shall be next week. I am, Sir,

alludes to.

Your most obedient servant,
WILLIAM HOLMES.

XX. SAMUEL ROGERS.

The vice of punning appears even to infect the note style of Sam Rogers. Here in three lines we have the jingle of "service," "service," and "servant.' The immense antiquity of Sam is finely adumbrated in the indefinite date which he assigns to the possible service of his namesake (we wonder he did not suspect some antediluvian affiliation) the respectable nonentity hight Samuel Wentworth-if ever, it was long ago." It is quite an ancestral voice," a sound from the dead. SIR, I have no recollection of Samuel Wentworth in my service; but, at all events, it must have been long ago. All my knowledge of his character should otherwise have been much at your service. Your obedient servant, SAMUEL ROGERS.

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St. James' Place, Jan. 21, 183-.

XXI.-WILLIAM MAGINN.

forth at the end of the epistle. Had Miller in person waited on old Coleridge, he would have answered his question in an essay, in which the fundamental principles of footmanship would have been laid down, according to the most recondite doctrines of Platonism, delivered in a flowing speech, terminable only at the announcement of dinner.

Monday Noon, 24 January, 183-. DEAR SIR,-The note which has this moment reached me, is the first I have received from you; and unable to form the most distant conjecture respecting either the person in whose behalf you interest yourself, or the object, I suspect that your letter may have been intended for one or other of my nephews-perhaps Mr. John Coleridge, the barrister, No. 2, Pond Court, Temple; or Henry Nelson Coleridge, the chancery barrister, No. 1, Lincoln's Inn Square; or the Rev. Edward Coleridge, Eton.

Be assured that the application, had it both reached me and fallen within my knowledge or power, would not have been neglected by Your humble servant,

Grove, Highgate.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

XXIII.-HENRY HALLAM.

What a thoroughly historiographical bit of a production is that which emanated from the same desk with The Middle Ages! Good heavens! one would think there was question about the pedigree of the White or Red Rose. And then the conjectural, the remote, semisceptical adumbration of a statement touching the affairs of Lord Graves! Well done, Hallam!

SIR,-I incline to think that there must be some mistake with respect to the subject of your note to me, especially as there is another gentleman of my name in the same street. I have had no footman for seven or eight years, who can be the person whose character you request. At that time, a man of the name of Charles (his surname I do not recolTo our surprise, the gruff Standard-bearing lect) lived with me, and went, of course with a charLL. D. comes most milky fashion out of this af-acter, to the Bishop of Exeter's, (now St. Asaph :) fair. The doctor's letter about the imaginary reporter, O'Hoolahan, is really a good-natured effusion; we had no notion he would have taken half so much trouble about any such animal, real or fictitious.

SIR,-I never knew a gentleman of the name of O'Hoolahan. A great many Irish persons are connected with the press, and perhaps a man of that name may be among them; he, however, has not fallen in my way. If he says I recommended him to your newspaper, there must be a mistake somewhere. Excuse this hasty note; I happen to be very busy just now.

Your most obedient servant,

WILLIAM MAGINN.

I am,
Sir,

Standard, Monday.

XXII. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

he lived, I think, afterwards with the late Lord
Graves. But I suppose he would hardly refer you to
me for a character, after such a lapse of time. If he
is the person, I can only say that I had no fault to
find with him, that I now remember; but should
not know him by sight if he were to enter the room.
I am, Sir,

Your very obedient servant,
HENRY HALLAM.

67 Wimpole Street, Jan. 22.

XXIV. JOHN WILSON.

We consider the following as very characteristic of the warm, good-hearted character of Professor Wilson.

Gloucester Place, Edinburgh, Sunday. SIR,-I am ashamed to observe that your letter has been lying by me for so many weeks unanswered. I conjectured the handwriting on the address to be that of a certain scamp that I had long ago determined to hold no correspondence with, and therefore Commend us to Coleridge. The old man threw the letter aside; but this morning I opened

it accidentally. Pray excuse this unintentional | waiting-maid of the Christian name of Margaret; neglect.

On recurring to my class-lists for 1828-9, I find that there were five John Smiths that session; but no one of the number distinguished himself in any creditable way whatever. The young gentleman | who refers you to me must therefore have made a mistake. I cannot surely have, on any occasion, signified to him my approbation of his intellectual exertions while attending the moral philosophy class here. There was one of them, a John Smith from Manchester, whom I distinctly remember as a disagreeable raff.

Your faithful servant,

JOHN WILSON.

XXV.-MISS EDGEWORTH.

Nothing reflects greater credit on Miller than his pertinacious badgering of Maria Edgeworth; but, to be sure, the organ of note-writing was always pretty well developed in that admirable per

son.

1, North Audley Street, Jan. 21, 183-. SIR,-Your letter addressed to Mrs. Edgeworth, inquiring the character of a person of the name of Margaret Riley, came to me this morning. No such person ever lived as lady's-maid with any of the family of Edgeworth, who reside at Edgeworth's Town, in Ireland. For anything I can tell to the contrary, she may have lived with some other family of the name of Edgeworth; but before this idea is suggested to her, it might be well to ascer

tain whether she asserts that she lived with the Edgeworths of Edgeworth's Town; by which means you may judge of her truth.

I am, Sir,

Your humble servant,

MARIA EDGEWORTH.

But the second effusion of our fair friend beats

all print. Only think of anybody that had any thing else to do scribbling all this worrying nonsense about Mrs., and Miss, and Margaret, and Harriet, (to the curliness of whose hair in those days we can bear unqualified testimony;) and then the simple and satisfactory method of solving the whole vexata quæstio, which at last suggests itself to the indefatigable paper-crosser, in paragraph the antepenultimate! Let her come to be inspected! To be sure she would.

1, North Audley Street, Monday. MADAM,-I am the person whom Margaret Riley describes as the "Mrs. Edgeworth the Authoress. But her calling me Mrs. Edgeworth leads me to doubt her knowing me; because, though I have been old enough these twenty years past to have assumed the title of Mrs., it has so happened that I have always, in my own family and in society, been called Miss Edgeworth-perhaps from the habit of being known best by that appellation as an author

her surname I cannot remember, but I am certain it was not Kelly, or any Irish name. She was English -was highly recommended to me by Mrs. Marcet, (now at Geneva ;) and this Margaret was an excellent lady's-maid, in every respect-an accomplished dress-maker, I can answer for it, having had occasion to try her powers, as I then went out a great deal, having then two young sisters with me.

Margaret-whatever her name may be-must, if she ever lived with me, recollect these two young ladies; and must also recollect where I lived. I lived in Holles street: the eldest of the young ladies named Fanny, the youngest Harriet. She could not also fail to recollect that Miss Harriet had curly hair, worn as a crop-a peculiarity in her appearance which none who have seen her could forget; and a still greater peculiarity would probably be reshe was, as our Margaret one day said to me, the membered by a lady's-maid and dress-maker, that most indifferent about dress of any young lady she had ever seen-" Ma'am! Miss Harriet was so good to look at the dress I finished for her, and said it was pretty." She cannot forget having said this to me, if she be the Margaret who lived with mc. Another circumstance in the words you quote of her makes me doubt it. She says that the Mrs. Edgeworth the authoress was one of the members of the family she lived with. Now I was at the time I speak of in London, keeping house for myself; I was her mistress, gave her all her orders, and paid her her wages; so that she would not naturally speak of me as one of the members of the family, but as specially her mistress.

When she left me, I gave our Margaret an excellent written character, which she deserved, else I should not have given it; for I am particularly exact and conscientious as to the character I give servants, thinking it as wrong to give a false character as it would be to forge a bank-note.

The character I gave Margaret procured her, after I parted with her,) a good place with Mrs. before I quitted town, (in the course of a few days Knox, (the Hon. Mrs. Knox, wife of a son of Lord Northlands, and daughter of the late primate of Ireland, Stuart.)

It seems to me odd that this person cannot produce either my written character, or any character from Mrs. Knox, if she be the person who lived

with me.

But, to settle the matter at once, she may come, if you wish, to North Audley street, No. 1, and I will see her, and say whether she is or is not the person who lived with me.

I am now with one of my sisters, who was with me when I was last in London, and she cannot fail to recollect our Margaret.

I

I can give no further information, and hope what have now said may be satisfactory.

I am, Madam,

Your obedient, humble servant,
MARIA EDGEWORTH.

XXVI.-WASHINGTON IRVING.

Here is one which we like. "I have resided almost entirely on the continent," says Geoffry Crayon, "and have had none but foreign servants." The affinity of blood and language speaks out in the word. Since the treaty of 1783, Americans of the United States are as foreign to us as Frenchmen or Spaniards--technically, but not truly.

James Chinnock, for anything Washington Ir

ving could have known, might have been a New Yorker or a Kentucky man. He might have been a white help, or a regular nigger from the land of liberty, as well as a native of the "old country;" but his name was not Jacques or Diego: it was James-Jem. And let the government of the States be what it pleases, that name cannot be for-lections, and sets about in quest of other evidence. eign to the ear of Washington Irving.

From Chambers' Journal.
THE OLD MAID FROM PRINCIPLE.

"Let him deny himself."

"COUSIN LUCY, when will you tell me why you are not married? You often promised to tell me when I was a little older. I am now nearly sixteen: is not that old enough?"

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Yes, love," replied the mild-eyed Cousin to know at the beginning that, whatever troubles Lucy; "you are, I think, old enough, and thought- and miseries you describe, it will all end happily at ful enough, to apply my tale to useful purpose; | last." so I will defer it no longer. Let us go to my "Not according to the sense you generally give favorite seat under the fir-trees, and we can then to those words, my wilding," responded her cousin, watch the sun set, while you listen to the old maid's caressing the young girl's redundant tresses; prosy story. Come, the shadows are stretching "since that implies that the lovers are married, nearly across the lawn, and I have the history of and live happily all the rest of their lives. My a life to relate." story, remember, is an answer to the question, Why am I an old maid?"

"Yet you seem happy?"

But

"Nay, I know not seems: I am happy; and there is no happiness equal to that which is inspired by the consciousness of having acted rightly. your question reminds me that I must begin my story, or night will overtake us before it is ended. You must know that my mother died when I was quite an infant. She had had many children, but of the whole number, only the eldest and the youngest grew up to womanhood. Now pray observe how many circumstances, arising chiefly from ignorance, conspired to bring my poor mother to her grave at the age of twenty-seven. She was

The fir-trees crowned the brow of a gentle western declivity, along which ran the miniature moat and palisades which formed the boundary of the pleasant garden. The slope below was rich with waving corn, mellowing in the breath of a warm July. Further still, the "hedge-row elms" were here gathered into majestic groups, and there stretched away in long irregular lines, enclosing fields of every hue, presented by a rich country in high cultivation. There was the bright tender green where the young grass was springing up after the hay harvest, the duskier shade of the pastures, the yellow barley, the feathery oats, and the sombre bean-field, all studded here and there with patches of the brilliant scarlet poppy. Bound-naturally delicate, and this delicacy was increased ing the prospect on the right might be seen a por- by a boarding-school education, where the confined, tion of the park-like meadow belonging to the house, polluted air, the want of exercise, the tight stiff dotted with enormous oaks and beeches; while on stays, and the unceasing mental exertion, completed the extreme left lay a wide extent of moorland, the destruction of the little vigor she once possessed. glowing with flowering gorse and heath flowers. Nevertheless, like a forced flower, she flourished The rich landscape swept away, diversified by an precociously for a time. At sixteen, she was a occasional village spire, a mass of darker wood, the woman in appearance and manners; and she had picturesque gable of some old farmhouse, or the only left school a few months, when she married silvery windings of a small river, and was termi-a man as ignorant as herself of the grave error they nated by a chain of lofty hills, towards which the were committing. Within a year, she gave birth sun was just sinking in a blaze of golden and crim-to a daughter. Six years more passed away, each son light. The "smell of dairy farms" mingled being marked by the birth of a child. I was the with the thousand luscious perfumes, that hang last, and, with the exception of my eldest sister, about the air of a summer evening; and the ear the only one who survived the age of eighteen. was soothed by the cooing of the wood pigeons, All the others sunk under some form of consumpthe tinkling of sheep-bells from the heath, the tion, that fell disease to which my mother had a evening song of the blackbird, and the ceaseless strong constitutional bias. Shortly after my birth, murmur of a hidden brook. A rustic bench of she, too, showed symptoms of this disorder, and unbarked wood extended beneath the ancient firs, in a few months she was laid beside her children." and on this Cousin Lucy and her youthful auditor Ah, then, I see why you would not marry : sat for a while, watching in silence the sunset you feared that all your children might die of conchanges of the gorgeous landscape. sumption?"

Now Cousin Lucy was by no means the venerable personage she seemed to think herself. She was not forty, and looked considerably younger; her complexion was pale and clear; her figure slight and graceful; and although the usual expression of her face, and her fine full eyes, was thoughtful almost to sadness, a sweet bright smile was ever ready to light them up as she witnessed the enjoyment of those around her.

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"Exactly. But I was not so fortunate as to learn my danger at your early years. In my young days, such subjects as physiology, or anything relating to it, were scouted, even by those who professed liberality, as quite unnecessary, if not improper, in female education. And so, for the want of the merest elementary knowledge of these important sciences, mothers, with the best intentions, bound up their daughters' figures in "There is no romance in my narrative," she unyielding web and whalebone, compressed their

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