metropolis, curls up the thin, blue, odoriferous vapour of Virginia or Oronooko; the benches are ranged in rows, the fields and hedge-rows spread out their verdure; Hampstead and Highgate are seen in the background, and contain the imagination within gentle limits-here the holiday people are playing ball-here they are playing bowls-here they are quaffing ale, there sipping tea-here the loud wager is heard, there the political debate. In a sequestered nook a slender youth, with purple face and drooping head, nodding over a glass of gin toddy, breathes in tender accents

"There's nought so sweet on earth

As Love's young dream."

While "Rosy Ann" takes its turn; and "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled" is thundering forth in accents that might wake the dead. In another part sits carpers and critics, who dispute the score of the reckoning or the game, or cavil at the taste and execution of the would-be Brahams and Durusets. HAZLITT.

THE TALKING LADY.

BEN JONSON has a play called the The Silent Woman, who turns out, as might be expected, to be no woman to all-nothing, as Master Slender said, but "a great lubberly boy;" thereby, as I apprehend, discourteously presuming that a silent woman is a nonentity. If the learned dramatist, thus happily prepared, had happened to fall in with such a specimen of female loqua

city as I have just parted with, he might perhaps have given us a pendant to his picture in the Talking Lady. Pity but he had! He would have done her justice, which I could not at any time, least of all now: I am too much stunned, too much like one escaped from a belfry on a coronation day. I am just resting from the fatigue of four days' hard listening,-four snowy, sleety, rainy days-days of every variety of falling weather, all of them too bad to admit the possibility that any petticoated thing, were she as hardy as a Scotch fir, should stir out,-four days chained by "sad civility" to that fireside, once so quiet, and again-cheering thought!-again I trust to be so, when the echo of that visitor's incessant tongue shall have died away.

The visitor in question is a very excellent and respectable lady, upright in mind and body, with a figure that does honour to her dancing-master; a face exceedingly well preserved, wrinkled and freckled, but still fair; and an air of gentility over her whole person, which is not in the least affected by her out-of-fashioned garb. She could never be taken for any thing but a woman of family, and perhaps she could as little pass for any other than an old maid. She took us in her way from London to the west of England; and being, as she wrote, "not quite well, not equal to much company, prayed that no other guest might be admitted, so that she might have the pleasure of our conversation all to herself."(Ours! as if it were possible for any of us to slide in a word edgewise!)—and especially enjoy the gratification of talking over old times with

the master of the house, her countryman. Such was the promise of her letter, and to the letter it has been kept. All the news and scandal of a large county forty years ago, and a hundred years before, and ever since all the marriages, deaths, births, elopements, lawsuits, and casualties of her own times, her father's, grandfather's, great-grandfather's nephew's, and grand nephew's, has she detailed with a minuteness, an accuracy, a prodigality of learning, a profuseness of proper names, a pedantry of locality which would excite the envy of a county historian, a king at arms, or even a Scotch novelist. Her knowledge is astonishing; but the most astonishing part of all is how she came by that knowledge. It should seem, to listen to her, as if, at some time of her life, she must have listened herself; and yet her countryman declares that, in the forty years he had known her, no such event has occurred; and she knows new news too!-It must be intuition. The manner of her speech has little remarkable. It is rather old fashioned and provincial, but perfectly ladylike, low, and gentle, and not seeming so fast as it is; like the great pedestrians, she clears her ground easily, and never seems to use any exertion; yet "I would my horse had the speed of her tongue, and so good a continuer." She will talk you sixteen hours a-day, for twenty days together, and not deduct one poor five minutes for halts and baiting time. Talking, sheer talking, is meat and drink and sleep to her. She likes nothing else. Eating is a sad interruption. For the tea-table she has some toleration; but dinner, with its clatter of

plates and jingling of knives and forks, dinner is her abhorrence. Nor are the other common pursuits of life more in her favour. Walking exhausts the breath that might be better employed. Dancing is a noisy diversion, and singing is worse. She cannot endure any music, except the long, grand, dull concerts, which nobody thinks of listening to. Reading and chess she classes together as silent barbarisms, unworthy of a social and civilized people. Cards, too, have their faults; there is a rivalry, a mute eloquence in those four aces, that leads away the attention; besides, partners will sometimes scold; so she never plays at cards: and upon the strength of this abstinence had very nearly passed for serious, till it was discovered that she could not abide a long sermon. She always looks out for the shortest preacher, and never went to above one Bible Meeting in her life.-" Such speeches!" quoth she: "I thought the men never meant to have done. People have great need of patience." Plays of course she abhors, and operas, and mobs, and all things that will be heard, especially children; though for babies, particularly when asleep, for dogs and pictures, and such silent intelligences as serve to talk of and talk to, she has a considerable partiality; and an agreeable and gracious flattery to the mamas and other owners of these pretty dumb things is a very usual introduction to her miscellaneous harangues. The matter of these orations is inconceivably various. Perhaps the local and genealogical anecdotes, the sort of supplement to the history of *****shire, may be her strongest

point; but she shines almost as much in medicine and housewifery. Her medical dissertations savour a little of that particular branch of the science called quackery. She has a specific against almost every disease to which the human frame is liable; and is terribly prosy and unmerciful in her symptoms. Her cures kill. In housekeeping, her notions resemble those of other verbal managers; full of economy and retrenchment, with a leaning towards reform, though she loves so well to declaim on the abuses in the cook's department, that I am not sure that she would very heartily thank any radical who should sweep them quite away. For the rest, her system sounds very finely in theory, but rather fails in practice. Her recipes would be capital, only that some way or other they don't eat well; her preserves don't keep; and her sweet wines are sure to turn sour. These are certainly her favourite topics; but any one will do. Allude to

some anecdote of the neighbourhood, and she forthwith treats you with as many parallel passages as are to be found in an air with variations. Take up a new publication, and she is equally at home there; for though she knows little of books, she has, in the course of an up-and-down life, met with a good many authors, and teases and provokes you by telling of them precisely what you do not care to hear, the maiden names of their wives, and the christian names of their daughters, and into what families their sisters and cousins married, and in what towns they have lived, what streets, and what numbers. Boswell himself never drew up the table of