rality is unbounded. He alone, of all the Brunswick-square coterie, condescended to bestow the slightest attention on English affairs, and had the goodness to apply himself with unfeigned earnestness to the improvement of our condition. Thus, whilst one pocket was filled with proposals to cut off the French army, and schemes to blow up the Tuilleries, (for though one of the most benevolent and mild-tempered men on earth, he was a perfect Guy Faux on paper,) the other was crammed with plans to pay off the national debt, thoughts on the commutation of tithes, and hints for a general enclosure bill. He had usually some little private projects too, and many an unwary fellow-speculator hath rued his patents for making coals better than those of Newcastle out of dirt and ashes, his improved Argand lamps, and self-working fishing-nets. In short, he was a thorough projector, one that "never was, but always to be," rich; quick, imaginative, plausible, eloquent, and the more dangerous because he was thoroughly honest, and had himself an entire faith in one scheme, till it was chased away by another, -a bubble like the rest!

Then came the chevalier des I.

By my life,

That Davies hath a mighty pretty wife!" The chevalier was a handsome man himself, tall, dark-visaged and whiskered, with a look rather of the new than of the old French school, fierce and soldierly; he was accomplished, too, in his way, played the flute, and wrote songs and enigmas; but his wife was undoubtedly the most remarkable thing belonging to him; not that she was a beauty either; I should rather call her the prettiest of pretty women; she was short, well-made, with fine black eyes, long glossy black hair, a clear brown complexion, a cocked-up nose, red lips, white teeth, and a most bewitching dimple. There was a tasteful smartness in her dress, which with a gentillesse in her hair, and a piquancy of expression, at once told her country, and gave a promise of intelligence and feeling. No one could look at her without being persuaded that she was equally sensible and lively; but no one could listen to her without discovering the mistake. She was the silliest Frenchwoman I ever encountered, I have met with some as stupid among my own Countrywomen; Heaven forbid that we should in any thing yield the palm to our neighbours! She never opened her lips without uttering some bêtise. Her poor husband, himself not the wisest of men, quite dreaded her speaking; for, besides that he was really fond of her, he knew that the high-born circle of which she formed a part, would be particularly on the watch for her mistakes, as she was roturière, the daughter of a farmer-general, who had fallen a sacrifice to the inhuman tyranny of Robespierre, leaving her no dower but her

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beauty. She was a most innocent and kindhearted person, and devotedly attached to her husband'; and yet his bitterest enemy could hardly have contrived to say more provoking things to and of him than she did in her fondness. I will give one instance; I might give fifty. L'Abbé de Lille, the celebrated French poet, and M. de Calonne, the no less noted ex-minister, had promised one Saturday to join the party in Brunswick-square. They came; and our chevalier, who had a tolerable opinion of! his own powers as a verse-maker, could not · miss so fair an opportunity of display. Accordingly, about half an hour before supper, he put on a look of distraction, strode hastily two or three times up and down the room, slapped his forehead, and muttered a line or two to himself; then calling hastily for pen and paper, began writing with the illegible rapidity of one who fears to lose a happy thought, a life-and-death kind of speed; then stopped a moment, as pausing for a word, then went on again fast, fast; then read the lines or seemed to read; then made a slight alteration;-in short, he acted incomparably the whole agony of composition, and finally with becoming diffidence presented the impromptu to our worthy host, who immediately imparted it to the company. It was heard with the lively approbation with which verses of compliment, read aloud in presence of the author and of the parties complimented, are sure to be received; and really, as far as I remember, the lines were very neatly turned. At last the commerce of flattery ceased. Bows, speeches, blushes, and apologies, were over; the author's excuses, the ex-minister's and the great poet's thanks, and the applause of the audience, died away; all that could be said about the impromptu was exhausted, the topic was fairly worn out, and a pause ensued, which was broken by madame des I. who had witnessed the whole scene with intense pleasure, and now exclaimed, with tears standing in her beautiful eyes, "How glad I am they like the impromptu! My poor dear chevalier! No tongue can tell what pains it has cost him! There he was all yesterday evening, writing, writing,—all the night long-never went to bed,-all to-dayonly finished just before we came,-My poor dear chevalier! I should have been so sorry if they had not liked his impromptu! Now he'll be satisfied." Be it recorded to the honour of French politeness, that, finding it impossible to stop, or to out-talk her (both which experiments were tried), the whole party pretended not to hear, and never once alluded to this impromptu fait à loisir, till the discomfited chevalier sneaked off with his pretty simpleton, smiling and lovely as ever, and wholly unconscious of offence. Then, to be sure, they did laugh.

I have committed a great breach of etiquette in mentioning the chevalier and his lady before the Baron de G. and his daughter Angelique.

THE INQUISITIVE GENTLEMAN.

ONE of the most remarkable instances that I know of that generally false theory "the ruling passion," is my worthy friend Samuel Lynx, Esq., of Lynx Hall in this countycommonly called the Inquisitive Gentleman. Never was cognomen better bestowed. Curiosity is, indeed, the master-principle of his mind, the life-blood of his existence, the mainspring of every movement.

Mr. Lynx is an old bachelor of large fortune and ancient family; the Lynxes of Lynx Hall, have amused themselves with overlooking their neighbours' doings for many generations. He is tall, but loses something of his height by a constant habit of stooping; he carries his head projecting before his body, -like one who has just proposed a question and is bending forward to receive an answer. A lady being asked, in his presence, what his features indicated, replied with equal truth and politeness-a most inquiring mind. The cock-up of the nose, which seems from the expansion and movement of the nostrils to be snuffing up intelligence, as a hound does the air of a dewy morning, when the scent lies well; the draw-down of the half-open mouth gaping for news; the erected chin; the wrinkled forehead; the little eager sparkling eyes, half shut, yet full of curious meanings; the strong red eye-brows, protruded like a cat's whiskers or a snail's horns, feelers, which actually seem sentient; every line and lineament of that remarkable physiognomy betrays a craving for information. He is exceedingly short-sighted; and that defect also, although, on the first blush of the business, it might seem a disadvantage, conduces materially to the great purpose of his existence-the knowledge of other people's affairs. Sheltered by that infirmity, our "curious impertinent" can stare at things and persons through his glasses in a manner which even he would scarcely venture with bare eyes. He can peep and pry and feel and handle, with an effrontery never equalled by an unspectacled man. He can ask the name and parentage of every body in company, toss over every book, examine every note and card, pull the flowers from the vases, take the pictures from the walls, the embroidery from your work-box, and the shawl off your back; and all with the most provoking composure, and just as if he was doing the right thing.

The propensity seems to have been born with him. He pants after secrets, just as magpies thieve, and monkeys break china, by instinct. His nurse reports of him that he came peeping into the world; that his very cries were interrogative, and his experiments in physics so many and so dangerous, that before he was four years old, she was fain to tie his hands behind him, and to lock him into

a dark closet to keep him out of harm's way, chiefly moved thereto by his ripping open his own bed, to see what it was made of, and throwing her best gown into the fire, to try if silk would burn. Then he was sent to school, a preparatory school, and very soon sent home again for incorrigible mischief. Then a private tutor undertook to instruct him on the interrogative system, which in his case was obliged to be reversed, he asking the questions, and the tutor delivering the responsesa new cast of the didactic drama. Then he went to college; then sallied forth to ask his way over Europe; then came back to fix on his paternal estate of Lynx Hall, where, except occasional short absences, he hath sojourned ever since, signalizing himself at every stage of existence, from childhood to youth, from youth to manhood, from manhood to age, by the most lively and persevering curiosity, and by no other quality under heaven.

If he had not been so entirely devoid of ambition, I think he might have attained to eminence in some smaller science, and have gained and received a name from a new moss, or an undiscovered butterfly. His keenness and sagacity would also have told well in antiquarian researches, particularly in any of the standing riddles of history, the Gowrie conspiracy, for instance, or the guilt of queen Mary, respecting which men may inquire and puzzle themselves from the first of January to the last of December without coming at all nearer to the solution. But he has no great pleasure in literature of any sort. Even the real parentage. of the Waverley novels, although nothing in the shape of a question comes amiss to him, did not interest him quite so much as might be expected; perhaps because it was so generally interesting. He prefers the "Bye-ways to the High-ways' of literature. The secrets of which every one talks, are hardly, in his mind, "Secrets worth knowing."

Besides, mere quiet guessing is not active enough for his stirring and searching faculty. He delights in the difficult, the inaccessible, the hidden, the obscure. A forbidden place is his paradise; a board announcing "steeltraps and spring guns" will draw him over a wall twelve feet high; he would undoubtedly have entered Blue-beard's closet, although certain to share the fate of his wives; and has had serious thoughts of visiting Constantinople, just to indulge his taste by stealing a glimpse of the secluded beauties of the seraglio-an adventure which would probably have had no very fortunate termination. Indeed our modern peeping Tom has encountered several mishaps at home in the course of his long search after knowledge; and has generally had the very great aggravation of being altogether unpitied. Once, as he was taking a morning ride, in trying to look over a wall

a little higher than his head, he raised himself in the saddle, and the sagacious quadraped, his grey pony, an animal of a most accommodating and congenial spirit, having been, for that day, discarded in favour of a younger, gayer, less inquisitive and less patient steed, the new beast sprang on and left him sprawling. Once, when in imitation of Ranger, he had perched himself on the topmost round of a ladder, which he found placed beneath a window in Upper Berkeleystreet, he lost his balance, and was pitched suddenly in through the sash, to the unspeakable consternation of a house-maid, who was rubbing the panes within side. Once he was tossed into an open carriage, full of ladies, as he stood up to look at them from the box of a stage-coach. And once he got a grievous knock from a chimney-sweeper, as he poked his head into the chimney to watch his operations. He has been blown up by a rocket; carried away in the strings of a balloon; all but drowned in a diving-bell: lost a finger in a mashing-mill; and broken a great toe by drawing a lead pin-cushion off a work-table. N. B. this last-mentioned exploit spoilt my worthy old friend, Miss Sewaway, a beautiful piece of fine netting, "worth," as she emphatically remarked, "a thousand toes."

These are only a few of the bodily mischiefs that have befallen poor Mr. Lynx. The moral scrapes, into which his unlucky propensity has brought him, are past all count. In his youth, although so little amorous, that I have reason to think, the formidable interrogatory which is emphatically called "popping the question," is actually the only question which he has never popped;-in his youth, he was very nearly drawn into wedlock by the sedulous attention which he paid to a young lady, whom he suspected of carrying on a clandestine correspondence. The mother scolded; the father stormed; the brother talked of satisfaction; and poor Mr. Lynx, who is as pacific as a Quaker, must certainly have been married, had not the fair nymph eloped to Gretna Green, the day before that appointed for the nuptials. So he got off for the fright. He hath undergone at least twenty challenges for different sorts of impertinences; hath had his ears boxed and his nose pulled; hath been knocked down and horsewhipped; all which casualties he bears with an exemplary patience. He hath been mistaken for a thief, a bailiff, and a spy, abroad and at home; and once, on the Sussex coast, was so inquisitive respecting the moon, and the tide, and the free trade, that he was taken at one and the same time, by the different parties, for a smuggler and a revenue officer, and narrowly escaped being shot in the one capacity, and hanged in the other.

The evils which he inflicts bear a tolerably fair proportion to those which he endures. He is, simply, the most disagreeable man that

lives. There is a curious infelicity about him, which carries him straight to the wrong point. If there be such a thing as a sore subject, he is sure to press on it, to question a parvenu on his pedigree, a condemned author on his tragedy, an old maid on her age. Besides these iniquities, his want of sympathy is so open and undisguised, that the most loquacious egotist loses the pleasure of talking of himself, in the evident absence of all feeling or interest on the part of the hearer. His conversation is always more like a judicial examination than any species of social intercourse, and often like the worst sort of examination-cross-questioning. He demands, like a secretary to the inquisition, and you answer (for you must answer) like a prisoner on the rack. Then the man is so mischievous! he rattles old china, marches over flower-beds, and paws Irling's lace. The people at museums and exhibitions dread the sight of him. He cannot keep his hands from moths and humming-birds; and once poked up a rattlesnake to discover whether the joints of the tail did actually produce the sound from which it derives its name; by which attack that pugnacious reptile was excited to such wrath that two ladies fell into hysterics. He nearly demolished the Invisible Girl by too rough an inquiry into her existence; and got turned out of the automaton chess-player's territories, in consequence of an assault which he committed on that ingenious piece of mechanism. To do Mr. Lynx justice, I must admit that he sometimes does a little good to all this harm. He has, by design or accident, in the ordinary exercise of his vocation, hindered two or three duels, prevented a good deal of poaching and pilfering, and even saved his own house, and the houses of his neighbours from divers burglaries; his vigilance being, at least, as useful, in that way, as a watchman or an alarm-bell.

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He makes but small use of his intelligence, however come by, which is, perhaps, occasioned by a distinctive difference of sex. A woman only half as curious would be prodigal of information-a spendthrift of news. Mr. Lynx hoards his, like a miser. Possession is his idol. If I knew any thing which I particularly wished the world not to know, I should certainly tell it to him at once. cret with him, is as safe as money in the bank; the only peril lies in the ardour of his pursuit. One reason for his great discretion seems to me to be his total incapacity of speech-in any other than the interrogative mood. His very tone is set to that key. I doubt if he can drop his voice at the end of a sentence, or knows the meaning of a full stop. Who? What? When? Where? How? are his catchwords; and Eh? his only interjection. Children and poor people, and all awkward persons who like to be talked to, and to talk again, but do not very well understand how to set about it, delight in Mr. Lynx's notice.