trap-ball within doors. 'There can be neither comfort nor neatness,' said he, where there are broken windows; but thus it is, every day, spite of all I can do.' He said this with angry looks-indeed, quite out of temper-in which he seemed to have undergone a change since I had seen him; nor was he softened by the reply of Mrs. Snaggs,—who seemed one of those who, to use her own expressions, always gave to others as good as they brought. Why, dear me,' cried she, not recollecting, or not caring for my presence, 'what's the matter with the man? What odds does it make, when you can so well afford to pay your bills? But I declare there is no doing any thing right; always scold, scold, scold! Ah! it was not so when you first married Letty."

"My friend was now utterly confounded. He dared not look at me, though he looked most angrily at his wife, as if reproaching her with her mother's vulgarity. This frightened poor, gentle Mrs. Sedley, who, with a quivering lip and trembling voice, whispered, rather than exclaimed, 'Oh, Mr. Sedley, do not frown so; you know it always kills me to see you frown; but you are always so angry.'

"At this she threw herself back in her chair, and covered her face with her hands. He immediately flew to her, saying, 'My dearest creature, I am not angry with you.'

"Oh! but you are with mamma, and that is worse,' said she; and she began to sob, which distressed him still more.

66

Perceiving that there was an actual scene prepar

ing, and pitying his confusion, which was very evident, I had nothing left for it but to remove myself from being a spectator of the struggle, and fairly decamped, walking into the court, until my friend, either as victor or defeated, should join me and explain these strange occurrences.

6

"In a few minutes he came out, and very frankly said, There; you have discovered in five minutes what I have endeavoured to conceal from you for nearly five years; I mean, how much, between my wife's tenderness and her mother's vulgarity (for I must speak out) I am worried out of my life with contending feelings. Poor Letitia is so soft and bending before me, calling herself always my protegée, and me her benefactor, which I cannot get her to leave off -she is so conscious of her obligations to me, as she ingenuously confesses, in marrying her, that it is impossible to assert one's self, even against her mother's coarse and usurping insolence, without being cut to the soul. I am not, as you see, wife-ridden; but I own, what is worse, I am, if I may so say, mother-inlaw-ridden and wife-tied. Certainly, it is a less evil to be a downright slave than to have one's hands bound so as to be forced to a daily submission to officious impertinence and unceasing vulgarity.'

"This speech let me at once into my poor friend's situation, certainly melancholy, if not downright unhappy. To say nothing of his wife, whom he evidently still loved, but who did not to me, by any means, answer the description he had given of her, it was palpable that he was hourly made miserable by

the vulgar minds and coarse manners of the relations by whom he was surrounded, and who stuck to him, as he observed, like leeches.

I could no more get rid

6

of them,' said he with a sigh, than I could get rid of vermin, except by destroying them; and this,' he added, with still more distress, 'would destroy my wife.'

I now

"I was horrified with this picture of a fine mind and generous heart, disappointed in all its fair expectations of happiness from congeniality of disposition and manners, and I saw in it only another proof of the evils attendant upon a mésalliance. plainly perceived one reason, at least, why he had withdrawn from those elegant circles to which he had been accustomed, and shut himself up with such inferior beings. I had attributed it to a romantic love and admiration for his wife. I found it was because he was ashamed of her connections, from whom he could not escape. They lived with him in the country, and took lodgings near him in town, and every hint he gave of a wish to be delivered from them, while it produced in Mrs. Sedley the most entire devotion to his will, produced also a proof that she thought herself a victim sacrificed to his pleasure. Tears and fits followed fast upon one another, and as she was always either in the family-way, or a nurse, the consequences would have been dreadful. His very love, therefore, stood most in the way of his wishes; and he was thus as much enthralled by the too great softness and morbid sensibility of his protegée wife, as poor Bostock was by his haughty mistress.

"This thraldom of his I had farther occasion to observe, in the shocks which his good taste were doomed perpetually to suffer from the companions to whose society he was condemned. At our breakfast, his mother-in-law would have called forth Lord Ogleby's fearful and emphatic exclamation, Hot rolls and butter in July!' such was her love for them, and such the quantity she laid in. At dinner, her ponderous form and heated complexion were not softened by a costly, thick crimson velvet dress, in the dog-days. A very large and coarse neck, though made very fine, was not fined down by a chain of massive mock cameos, seemingly of Derbyshire spar. This, and the exertion of eating and carving, occasioned her to suffer profusely, for which there was a perpetual recourse to her handkerchief-nay, as she herself told us, she often required two. Sedley groaned outright, but his gentle lady only exclaimed poor mamma!'

‘

"The two young ladies, his sisters-in-law, seemed so occupied with the pleasures and labours of eating, (sometimes sucking their fingers, and sometimes the inside of their cheeks, to give a favourite morsel an additional zest) that they spoke little; which so far was an advantage, that it lessened the sources of Sedley's disgust. But who shall tell his consternation when they laded gravy into their mouths with their knives!

"I must not omit an accession which the company had received at our first dinner, in the person of Mr. Stubbington Snaggs, brother of the hostess, a strongbuilt, ponderous gentleman, with a head very like a

bull-dog, and who seemed to realize the representation of the gormandizer in Wilkie's admirable picture of the Rent-day-who, with a large bone sticking across his mouth, is holding out his plate for more, before either plate or mouth is empty.

"After dinner this gentleman confirmed his brother's mortification by proving, from his discourse, that his inward sentiments were as gross as his outward habits. My friend, therefore, seemed relieved from a heavy burthen when, our wine being finished, he asked me to escape with him into the garden. “Here he recommenced the subject of the morning's complaint. It is not,' said he, that I love my wife less than when I married her.'

6

Here he hesitated,

fearing perhaps that he had opened too much, but went on, as if in parenthesis, You see I still look

upon you as my counsellor and confessor, though no longer my tutor.' I begged him always to consider me so, and as such to believe me a friend heartily interested for his welfare. I trust, however,' said I, that the prospect of happiness you anticipated from Mrs. Sedley's attachment, and her capacity as well as wish to cultivate her mind so as to be thoroughly your companion-I trust that this balances all these drawbacks, which, I own, seem great, but for which she at least is not to blame.'

"My dear friend,' said he, pressing my arm, 'I wish the balance you talk of could exist; but were wife more what I hoped to make her, and really all she wishes herself to be for my sake, I doubt her's, I doubt anybody's power to make me content with

my