are

"about it," but the invention never comes from his pate at all, and if it did, there are no brains to pluck out. He is a spendthrift in words and a miser in meanings. He must needs go beating about the bush, when he knows all the time there is no game there.

Life is too short to warrant the expenditure of a single hour upon the remorseless prolixities of these roundabout ramblers. Their yarns are like the Irish sailor's long line of rope, of which somebody had "cut off the other end," so that pull in as he might there was no coming to it.

"Grant me patience, just Heaven !"

Yes, we have all need of it, only grant me not enough to listen away my little lifetime in an easy-chair, sleepily nodding assent to the never-ending monotonous hum of the daily drawler, as he perseveres in telling one "all about it."

If he have anything to say before he dies, let him say it. Every man has a right to address his fellowcreatures before he is turned off; but he has no right to cheat me of my morning, because he is doomed for his sins to get rid of his own.

If he have a romance to relate, let him introduce at once his bore of a monk, or beast of a baron, without stopping a long hour to "gild the western hemisphere." If his tale bear date the 19th of October, let him state the fact; and not indulge in an insufferable dissertation upon that bleak autumnal season, when the leaves of the forest, &c., like human hopes, &c., suggesting lessons of mortality, &c.

If he must tell us something about John Smith, let him at least allow John Smith's father to sleep quietly in the grave, and not rip up ancient grievances by beginning like those abominable nuisances, the browncoated old baronets on the stage, with "Let me see,

it is now exactly twenty-three years ago this day, since"

If the gentle Howard himself had failed to hiss furiously at this point, he would have proved himself more fool than philanthropist.

Above all, if he have only the regular bit of daily news, the appropriate morning gossip to communicate; why, out with it. Has Beau Tibbs gone into the bench? say so simply. Has old Sir Peter Teazle's wife run away with Doricourt? there are just ten words necessary, with one note of admiration.

Grant that they have had "goose three days running" at No. 6; that Hicks's man has been taken up for swindling; that the nurse-maid opposite has got another clean clerk to walk round the corner with; and that the Bolts have gone away in the night: still there is no necessity for a volume upon each incident, the incident itself being after all left out of the volume.

Tell us the event, if you must; but spare us "all about it." We shall not stint the man of brevity in his choice of subjects. He shall tell us that a relation of ours is going to be hanged, or that a friend has met with a piece of great good luck; the unwelcome news shall not sour our temper. He shall announce the loss of our foreign scrip, the death of a favourite dog, or the return of a tyrannical dowager to our tranquil domicile when least wanted; we shall not wince much, if the tale be not long. Nay, he shall gently intimate that the income-tax is doubled, fourteenpence in the pound; but unless he would see an image of

"Moody madness laughing wild

Amidst severest woe,"

let him not aggravate the injury by telling us in cold blood all about it, or affecting to explain the terrible mystery of the schedules.

The witness-box is often an excellent place for the display of "Knowledge under no Difficulties." There you continually meet with people, who are prepared at a moment's notice, whatever the case may be, to tell his worship all about it. Bring them to the point, however, his worship cannot, although he is many times assured that "that's what they're coming to." They know everything and everybody, except the circumstances of the affair, and the parties about whom they are interrogated. They saw nothing done and they heard nothing said; but they have been informed by one whose name they don't know, that something did take place, and they have certain thoughts of their own which are much at everybody's service. This is what they call knowing all about it.

The same phrase is in use, by a similar class of persons, at the hustings and at public meetings: where, directly a speaker, blessed with lungs and listeners, declares that the question of wool, timber, sugar, or corn, then and there agitated, has been utterly misunderstood, and he shall make bold to tell that intelligent audience for the first time all about it; you know your fate. If you have nothing to do, go and do it, but stay not there, unless the great Panjandrum with the little round button at top be the god of your idolatry.

If these knowing persons would be content with their knowledge, all would be well; but knowledge is power, and people who have power love sometimes to exercise it unmercifully. Thus, we cannot mention the philosopher's stone, but we find they know all about it. Shift the conversation to every opposite subject in turn, from Pompey's pillar to the songs of Ossian, the round towers of Ireland, the late mysterious murder, the Homeric birthplace, the last of the antediluvian turnups, or the authorship of Junius's letters; and in every

successive instance, wherever a field is opened for doubt, or a mine of speculation and research is sprung, it invariably happens that they know all about it. Should you relate a private dream which you had last night, or invent a chain of impossibilities expressly for the occasion, you find them equally foreknowing, and can only wonder in what profound depth they picked up the information.

They have always an exclusive story of their own, which is, like a worn-out shilling, without head or tail to it. Every story, nevertheless, is furnished with two heroes, one is a cock and the other a bull; and these are constantly in one another's way.

If ignorance be bliss, verily each of these persons might be supposed to cry, "Me miserable!" On the contrary, to the confusion of the melancholy sons of wisdom, they are the happiest dogs living.

4,-PERSONS WHO ARE NEVER WITHOUT AN EXCUSE:

Ir is almost a proverb in the land that you can never catch a woman without an excuse ready made, be her surprise or her emergency what it may. Rosalind tells us that we shall never catch a woman without her answer; and the brilliancy and affluence of her "woman's wit," confirming her own confident assertion of its unfailing qualities in her sex, almost establishes her case. But it must be recollected, on the other hand, that all sweet Rosalind's pearls and diamonds can never shed a single ray of light that may show us how to estimate truly the riches of a woman's resources in that respect; for this simple reason, that Rosalind is not the author of the play, and that, in reality, her "woman's

wit" is the wit of a man; if, indeed, we can bring ourselves to think of Shakspeare as only one.

If women have at command a greater store of pertinent answers and apt excuses than men, it is only another proof that wealth is often heaped where it is almost superfluous. As her fewer faults require fewer excuses than our large batch of grosser sins, so again she less needs the resource of an excuse, in virtue of that consideration and indulgence with which we habitually regard the smaller foibles of her character; her little every-day transgressions, which brutal husbands alone call "whoppers."

Perhaps it was her reputed superiority in the art of making excuses, that by degrees suggested to vast numbers of the sex she rules ("rules," so long as she doesn't "show she rules") the expediency of cultivating it to the utmost, of employing it as an invaluable ally. At all events, we now live in the heart of a great world, which, want what it may, never wants an excuse. The exemption conceded to all kings is claimed by most subjects; who "can do no wrong," because each in his own personal case is ready to prove it right. Every individual atom of the sovereign people becomes upon this plan an imperial Cæsar, and, we know,

"Cæsar did never wrong, but with just cause,"

That's just it. We never do wrong but upon right principles, and never commit a fault without an excellent reason for it. The justice of our cause vindicates the injustice of our deeds; and the purity of our motives covers the grossness or want of charity of our speech.

Among our law-makers, high and low, the art of excuse-making is carried to perfection. An act repealed, or an act passed, may be in itself an ill deed; not so, if it can happily boast a good excuse. The change might not be just what then? It was expedient.