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to be sure, that increasing family circle which brings up old Mrs. Smith from Swansea every year.

What is the lot of a man at the end of a dozen years who has a wife like this? She is handsome no longer, and she never had any other merit. He can't read novels to her all through his life, while she is working slippers — it is absurd. He can't be philandering in Kensington Gardens with a lady who does not walk out now except with two nursemaids and the twins in a go-cart. He is a young man still, when she is an old woman. Love is a mighty fine thing, dear Bob, but it is not the life of a man. There are a thousand other things for him to think of besides the red lips of Lucy, or the bright eyes of Eliza. There is business, there is friendship, there is society, there are taxes, there is ambition, and the manly desire to exercise the talents which are given us by heaven, and reap the prize of our desert. There are other books in a man's library besides Ovid; and after dawdling ever so long at a woman's knee, one day he gets up and is free. We have all been there: we have all had the fever the strongest and the smallest, from Samson, Hercules, Rinaldo, downwards; but it burns out, and you get well.

Ladies who read this, and who know what a love I have for the whole sex, will not, I hope, cry out at the above observations, or be angry because I state that the ardor of love declines after a certain period. My dear Mrs. Hopkins, you would not have Hopkins to carry on the same absurd behavior which he exhibited when he was courting you? or in place of going to bed and to sleep comfortably, sitting up half the night to write to you bad verses? You would not have him racked with jealousy if you danced or spoke with any one else at a ball; or neglect all his friends, his business, his interest in life, in order to dangle at your feet? No, you are a sensible woman; you know that he must go to his counting-house, that he must receive and visit his friends, and that he must attend to his and your interest in life. You are no longer his goddess, his fairy, his peerless paragon, whose name he shouted as Don Quixote did that of Dulcinea. You are Jane Hopkins, you are thirty years old, you have got a parcel of children, and Hop loves you and them with all his heart. He would be a helpless driveller and ninny were he to be honeymooning still, whereas he is a good honest fellow, respected on 'Change, liked by his friends, and famous for his port-wine.

Yes, Bob, the fever goes, but the wife doesn't. Long after your passion is over, Mrs. Brown will be at your side, good soul, still; and it is for that, as I trust, long subsequent period

of my worthy Bob's life, that I am anxious. How will she look when the fairy brilliancy of the honeymoon has faded into the light of common day?

You are of a jovial and social turn, and like to see the world, as why should you not? It contains a great number of kind and honest folks, from whom you may hear a thousand things wise and pleasant. A man ought to like his neighbors, to mix with his neighbors, to be popular with his neighbors. It is a friendly heart that has plenty of friends. You can't be talking to Mrs. Brown for ever and ever: you will be a couple of old geese if you do.

She ought then to be able to make your house pleasant to your friends. She ought to attract them to it by her grace, her good breeding, her good humor. Let it be said of her, "What an uncommonly nice woman Mrs. Brown is!" Let her be, if not a clever woman, an appreciator of cleverness in others, which, perhaps, clever folks like better. Above all, let her have a sense of humor, my dear Bob, for a woman without a laugh in her (like the late excellent Mrs. Brown) is the greatest bore in existence. Life without laughing is a dreary blank. A woman who cannot laugh is a wet blanket on the kindly nuptial couch. A good laugh is sunshine in a house. A quick intelligence, a brightening eye, a kind smile, a cheerful spirit, these, I hope, Mrs. Bob will bring to you in her trousseau, to be used afterwards for daily wear. Before all things, my dear Nephew, try and have a cheerful wife.

What, indeed, does not that word "cheerfulness" imply? It means a contented spirit, it means a pure heart, it means a kind and loving disposition; it means humility and charity; it means a generous appreciation of others, and a modest opinion of self. Stupid people, people who do not know how to laugh, are always pompous and self-conceited; that is, bigoted; that is, cruel; that is, ungentle, uncharitable, unchristian. Have a good, jolly, laughing, kind woman, then, for your partner, you who are yourself a kind and jolly fellow; and when you go to sleep, and when you wake, I pray there may be a smile under each of your honest nightcaps.

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OUT OF TOWN.

I.

I HAVE little news, my dear Bob, wherewith to entertain thee from this city, from which almost everybody has fled within the last week, and which lies in a state of torpor. I wonder what the newspapers find to talk about day after day, and how they come out every morning. But for a little distant noise of cannonading from the Danube and the Theiss, the whole world is silent, and London seems to have hauled down her flag, as her Majesty has done at Pimlico, and the queen of cities has gone out of town.

You, in pursuit of Miss Kicklebury, are probably by this time at Spa or Homburg. Watch her well, Bob, and see what her temper is like. See whether she flirts with the foreigners much, examine how she looks of a morning (you will have a hundred opportunities of familiarity, and can drop in and out of a friend's apartments at a German watering-place as you never can hope to do here), examine her conduct with her little sisters, if they are of the party, whether she is good and playful with them, see whether she is cheerful and obedient to old Lady Kick (I acknowledge a hard task) — in fine, try her manners and temper, and see whether she wears them all day, and only puts on her smiles with her fresh bonnet, to come out on the parade at music time. I, meanwhile, remain behind, alone in our airy and great Babylon.

As an old soldier when he gets to his ground begins straightway à se caser, as the French say, makes the most of his circumstances, and himself as comfortable as he can, an old London man, if obliged to pass the dull season in town, accommodates himself to the time, and forages here and there in the deserted city, and manages to make his own tent snug. A thousand means of comfort and amusement spring up, whereof a man has no idea of the existence, in the midst of the din and racket of the London season. I, for my part, am grown to that age, sir, when I like the quiet time the best: the gayety of the great London season is too strong and noisy for me; I like to talk to my beloved metropolis when she has done dancing at crowded balls, and squeezing at concerts, and chattering at conversaziones, and gorging at great dinners when she is calm, contemplative, confidential, and at leisure.

Colonel Padmore of our Club being out of town, and too wise a man to send his favorite old cob to grass, I mounted him yesterday, and took a ride in Rotten Row, and in various parts of the city, where but ten days back all sorts of life, hilarity, and hospitality, were going on. What a change it is now in the Park, from that scene which the modern Pepys, and that ingenious youth who signs his immortal drawings with a D surmounted by a dickey-bird, depicted only a few weeks ago! Where are the thousands of carriages that crawled along the Serpentine shore, and which give an observant man a happy and wholesome sense of his own insignificance for you shall be a man long upon the town, and pass five hundred equipages without knowing the owners of one of them? Where are the myriads of horsemen who trampled the Row? - the splendid dandies whose boots were shiny, whose chins were tufted, whose shirts were astounding, whose manners were frank and manly, whose brains were somewhat small? Where are the stout old capitalists and bishops on their cobs (the Bench, by the way, cuts an uncommonly good figure on horseback)? Where are the dear rideresses, above all? Where is she the gleaming of whose red neck-ribbon in the distance made your venerable uncle's heart beat, Bob? He sees her now prancing by, severe and beautiful

a young Diana, with pure bright eyes! Where is Fanny, who wore the pretty gray hat and feather, and rode the pretty gray mare? Fanny changed her name last week, without ever so much as sending me a piece of cake. The gay squadrons have disappeared: the ground no longer thrills with the thump of their countless hoofs. Watteau-like groups in shot silks no longer compose themselves under the green boughs of Kensington Gardens: the scarlet trumpeters have blown themselves away thence; you don't behold a score of horsemen in the course of an hour's ride; and Mrs. Catherine Highflyer, whom a fortnight since you never saw unaccompanied by some superb young Earl and roué of the fashion, had yesterday so little to do with her beautiful eyes, that she absolutely tried to kill your humble servant with them as she cantered by me in at the barriers of the Row, and looked round firing Parthian shots behind her. But Padmore's cob did not trot, nor did my blood run, any the quicker, Mr. Bob; man and beast are grown too old and steady to be put out of our pace by any Mrs. Highflyer of them all; and though I hope, if I live to be a hundred, never to be unmoved by the sight of a pretty girl, it is not thy kind of beauty, O ogling and vain Delilah, that can set me cantering after thee.

By the way, one of the benefits I find in the dull season is at my own lodgings. When I ring the bell now, that uncommonly pretty young woman, the landlady's daughter, condescends to come in and superintend my comfort, and whisk about amongst the books and tea-things, and wait upon me in general: whereas in the full season, when young Lord Claude Lollypop is here attending to his arduous duties in Parliament, and occupying his accustomed lodgings on the second floor, the deuce a bit will Miss Flora ever deign to bring a message or a letter to old Mr. Brown on the first, but sends me in Muggins, my old servant, whose ugly face I have known any time these thirty years, or the blowsy maid-of-all-work with her sandy hair in

papers.

Again, at the Club, how many privileges does a man lingering in London enjoy, from which he is precluded in the full season? Every man in every Club has three or four special aversions - men who somehow annoy him, as I have no doubt but that you and I, Bob, are hated by some particular man, and for that excellent reason for which the poet disliked Dr. Fell — the appearance of old Banquo, in the same place, in the same arm-chair, reading the newspaper day after day and evening after evening; of Mr. Plodder threading among the coffee-room tables and taking note of every man's dinner; of old General Hawkshaw, who makes that constant noise in the Club, sneezing, coughing, and blowing his nose-all these men, by their various defects or qualities, have driven me half mad at times, and I have thought to myself, Oh, that I could go to the Club without seeing Banquo- Oh, that Plodder would not come and inspect my mutton-chop- Oh, that fate would remove Hawkshaw and his pocket-handkerchief for ever out of my sight and hearing! Well, August arrives, and one's three men of the sea are off one's shoulders. Mr. and Mrs. Banquo are at Leamington, the paper says; Mr. Plodder is gone to Paris to inspect the dinners at the "Trois Frères ;" and Hawkshaw is coughing away at Brighton, where the sad sea waves murmur before him. The Club is your own. How pleasant it is! You can get the Globe and Standard now without a struggle; you may see all the Sunday papers; when you dine it is not like dining in a street dinned by the tramp of waiters perpetually passing with clanking dishes of various odors, and jostled by young men who look scowlingly down upon your dinner as they pass with creaking boots. They are all gone you sit in a vast and agreeable apartment with twenty large servants at your orders - if you were a Duke with a thousand pounds a day you couldn't

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