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trude! Allonby Short; "oh what a falling off was there!"-If the son should have half his father's genius, he will get an act of parliament, and discard it altogether.

The prefixing of a little miserable name to another of the same class is also exceedingly fashionable amongst our parvenus. They seem to think that in names, as in figures, value increases tenfold by the addition of a cipher. Hence the unnatural and portentous union of hideous monosyllables on name-tickets and door-plates, where two "low words oft creep in one dull line." Hence your White Sharps, | your Ford Greens, your Hall Gills, and other appellations of the same calibre, which stare you in the face go where you will, and are clung to with a jealous tenacity of which the Percies and Howards and Cavendishes (for whom one name is enough) never dream. Hence all varieties in spelling, devices to turn the vulgar to the genteel by the mere change of a letter: * hence the De's and the Fitz's, by which good common English is transmogrified into bad French, to be mispronounced by the ignorant and laughed at by the wise, the deserved and inevitable fate of pretension, ridiculous in every thing, and most of all in cottage names.

WALKS IN THE COUNTRY.

THE SHAW.

SEPT. 9th,- A bright sunshiny afternoon. What a comfort it is to get out again-to see once more that rarity of rarities, a fine day! We English people are accused of talking over-much of the weather; but the weather, this summer, has forced people to talk of it. Summer! did I say? Oh! season most unworthy of that sweet, sunny name! Season of coldness and cloudiness, of gloom and rain! A worse November!- for in November the days are short; and shut up in a warm room, lighted by that household sun, a lamp, one feels through the long evenings comfortably independent of the out-of-door tempests. But

*It is a pity that the hero of Mr. Lamb's excellent farce," Mr. 11." did not possess a little of this sort of ingenuity. I am convinced that the addition or omission of a few letters, or even the transposition, the making an anagram of the word, or some such quip or quiddity, would have converted "Hog's-flesh" into a very respectable appellation. Did not Miss Hannah K. for instance, make herself at once genteel and happy by merely striking out the first letter and the last-vile useless aspirates? And did not Martha D. become a fashionable lady at a stroke by one bold erratum, "for Martha read Matilda" in the first leaf of that domestic register the family Bible? There is nothing so ingenious under the sun as your genuine name-coiner! A forger by profession is less dexterous, a coat-of-arms maker less imaginative. It is the very triumph of invention.

though we may have, and did have, fires all through the dog-days, there is no shutting out day-light; and sixteen hours of rain, pattering against the windows and dripping from the eaves-sixteen hours of rain, not merely audible but visible, for seven days in the weekwould be enough to exhaust the patience of Job or Grizzel; especially if Job were a farmer, and Grizzel a country gentlewoman. Never was known such a season! Hay swimming, cattle drowning, fruit rotting, corn spoiling! and that naughty river the Loddon, who never can take Puff's advice, and “keep between its banks," running about the country, fields, roads, gardens and houses, like mad! The weather would be talked of. Indeed, it was not easy to talk of any thing else. A friend of mine having occasion to write me a letter, thought it worth abusing in rhyme, and bepommelled it through three pages of BathGuide verse; of which I subjoin a specimen:

"Aquarius surely reigns over the world.
And of late he his water-pot strangely has twirled ;
Or he's taken a cullender up by mistake,
And unceasingly dips it in some mighty lake;
Though it is not in Lethe-for who can forget
The annoyance of getting most thoroughly wet?
It must be in the river called Styx, I declare,
For the moment it drizzles it makes the men swear.
It did rain to-morrow," is growing good grammar;
Vauxhall and camp-stools have been brought to the
hammer;

A pony-gondola is all I can keep,

And I use my umbrella and pattens in sleep:
Row out of my window, whene'er 'tis my whim
To visit a friend, and just ask Can you swim ?"

So far my friend. In short, whether in prose or in verse, every body railed at the weather. But this is over now. The sun has come to dry the world; mud is turned into dust; rivers have retreated to their proper limits; farmers have left off grumbling; and we are about to take a walk, as usual, as far as the Shaw, a pretty wood about a mile off. But one of our companions being a stranger to the gentle reader, we must do him the honour of an introduction.

Dogs, when they are sure of having their own way, have sometimes ways as odd as

+ This friend of mine is a person of great quickness and talent, who, if she were not a beauty and a woman of fortune-that is to say, if she were prompted by either of those two powerful stimuli, want of money or want of admiration, to take due pains,-would inevitably become a clever writer. As it is, her notes and jeux d'esprit, struck off à trait de plume, have great point and neatness. Take the following billet, which formed the label to a closed basket, containing the ponderous present alluded to, last Michaelmas Day: "To Miss M. When this you see Remember me,'

Was long a phrase in use;

And so I send

To you, dear friend,

My proxy. What? A goose!"

those of the unfurred unfeathered animals, who walk on two legs, and talk, and are called rational. My beautiful white greyhound, Mayflower, for instance, is as whimsical as the finest lady in the land. Amongst her other fancies, she has taken a violent affection for a most hideous stray dog, who made his appearance here about six months ago, and contrived to pick up a living in the village, one can hardly tell how. Now appealing to the charity of old Rachel Strong, the laundress -a dog-lover by profession; now winning a meal from the light-footed and open-hearted lasses at the Rose; now standing on his hindlegs, to extort by sheer beggary a scanty morsel from some pair of "drouthy cronies," or solitary drover, discussing his dinner or supper on the alehouse-bench; now catching a mouthful, flung to him in pure contempt by some scornful gentleman of the shoulder-knot, mounted on his throne, the coach-box, whose notice he had attracted by dint of ugliness; now sharing the commons of Master Keep the shoemaker's pigs; now succeeding to the reversion of the well-gnawed bone of Master Brown the shopkeeper's fierce house-dog; now filching the skim-milk of Dame Wheeler's cat-spit at by the cat; worried by the mastiff; chased by the pigs; screamed at by the dame; stormed at by the shoemaker; flogged by the shopkeeper; teazed by all the children, and scouted by all the animals of the parish; but yet living through his griefs, and bearing them patiently, "for sufferance is the badge of all his tribe;"-and even seeming to find, in an occasional full meal, or a gleam of sunshine, or a wisp of dry straw on which to repose his sorry carcase, some comfort in his disconsolate condition.

tached, and affectionate animal that I have ever known; and that is saying much. He seems to think it necessary to atone for his ugliness by extra good conduct, and does so dance on his lame leg, and so wag his scrubby tail, that it does any one who has a taste for happiness good to look at him-so that he may now be said to stand on his own footing. We are all rather ashamed of him when strangers come in the way, and think it necessary to explain that he is May's pet; but amongst ourselves, and those who are used to his appearance, he has reached the point of favouritism in his own person. I have, in common with wiser women, the feminine weakness of loving whatever loves me-and therefore, I like Dash. His master has found out that he is a capital finder, and in spite of his lameness will hunt a field or beat a cover with any spaniel in England-and, therefore, he likes Dash. The boy has fought a battle in defence of his beauty, with another boy, bigger than himself, and beat his opponent most handsomely-and, therefore, he likes Dash; and the maids like him, or pretend to like him, because we do-as is the fashion of that pliant and imitative class. And now Dash and May follow us everywhere, and are going with us to the Shaw, as I said before-or rather to the cottage by the Shaw, to bespeak milk and butter of our little dairywoman, Hannah Bint- -a housewifely occupation, to which we owe some of our pleasantest rambles.

And now we pass the sunny, dusty village street- who would have thought, a month ago, that we should complain of sun and dust again!-and turn the corner where the two great oaks hang so beautifully over the clear In this plight was he found by May, the deep pond, mixing their cool green shadows most high-blooded and aristocratic of grey- with the bright blue sky, and the white clouds hounds; and from this plight did May rescue that flit over it; and loiter at the wheeler's him;-invited him into her territory, the sta- shop, always picturesque, with its tools, and ble; resisted all attempts to turn him out; re- its work, and its materials, all so various in instated him there, in spite of maid and boy, form, and so harmonious in colour; and its and mistress, and master; wore out every noisy, merry workmen, hammering and singbody's opposition, by the activity of her pro-ing, and making a various harmony also. The tection, and the pertinacity of her self-will; made him sharer of her bed and of her mess; and, finally, established him as one of the family as firmly as herself.

Dash-for he has even won himself a name amongst us; before he was anonymous-Dash is a sort of a kind of a spaniel; at least there is in his mongrel composition some sign of that beautiful race. Besides his ugliness, which is of the worst sort-that is to say, the shabbiest-he has a limp on one leg that gives ja peculiarly one-sided awkwardness to his gait; but independently of his great merit in being May's pet, he has other merits which serve to account for that phenomenon-being, beyond all comparison, the most faithful, at

* Dead, alas, since this was written!

shop is rather empty to-day, for its usual inmates are busy on the green beyond the pond

- one set building a cart, another painting a wagon. And then we leave the village quite behind, and proceed slowly up the cool, quiet Jane, between tall hedge-rows of the darkest verdure, overshadowing banks green and fresh as an emerald.

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shows some inclination to elope into the fields, in pursuit of those noisy iniquities. But he is an orderly person after all, and a word has checked him.

Ah! here is a shriller din mingling with the small artillery-a shriller and more continuous. We are not yet arrived within sight of Master Weston's cottage, snugly hidden behind a clump of elms; but we are in full hearing of Dame Weston's tongue, raised as usual to scolding-pitch. The Westons are new arrivals in our neighbourhood, and the first thing heard of them was a complaint from the wife to our magistrate of her husband's beating her: it was a regular charge of assault-an information in full form. A most piteous case did Dame Weston make of it, softening her voice for the nonce into a shrill tremulous whine, and exciting the pity and anger-pity towards herself, anger towards her husband of the whole female world, pitiful and indignant as the female world is wont to be on such occasions. Every woman in the parish railed at Master Weston; and poor Master Weston was summoned to attend the bench on the ensuing Saturday, and answer the charge; and such was the clamour abroad and at home, that the unlucky culprit, terrified at the sound of a warrant and a constable, ran away, and was not heard of for a fortnight.

At the end of that time he was discovered, and brought to the bench; and Dame Weston again told her story, and, as before, on the full cry. She had no witnesses, and the bruises of which she made complaint had disappeared, and there were no women present to make common cause with the sex. Still, however, the general feeling was against Master Weston; and it would have gone hard with him when he was called in, if a most unexpected witness had not risen up in his favour. His wife had brought in her arms a little girl about eighteen months old, partly perhaps to move compassion in her favour; for a woman with a child in her arms is always an object that excites kind feelings. The little girl had looked shy and frightened, and had been as quiet as a lamb during her mother's examination; but she no sooner saw her father, from whom she had been a fortnight separated, than she clapped her hands, and laughed, and cried, "Daddy! daddy!" and sprang into his arms, and hung round his neck, and covered him with kisses-again shouting, "Daddy, come home! daddy! daddy!". -and finally nestled her little head in his bosom, with a fulness of contentment, an assurance of tenderness and protection such as no wife-beating tyrant ever did inspire, or ever could inspire since the days of King Solomon. Our magistrates acted in the very spirit of the Jewish monarch: they accepted the evidence of nature, and dismissed the complaint. And subsequent events have fully justified their decision; Mistress Weston proving not only

renowned for the feminine accomplishment of scolding (tongue-banging, it is called in our parts, a compound word which deserves to be Greek), but actually herself addicted to administering the conjugal discipline, the infliction of which she was pleased to impute to her luckless husband.

Now we cross the stile, and walk up the fields to the Shaw. How beautifully green this pasture looks! and how finely the evening sun glances between the boles of that clump of trees, beach, and ash, and aspen! and how sweet the hedge-rows are with woodbine and wild scabius, or, as the country people call it, the gipsy-rose! Here is little Dolly Weston, the unconscious witness, with cheeks as red as a real rose, tottering up the path to meet her father. And here is the carrotypolled urchin, George Coper, returning from work, and singing "Home! sweet Home!" at the top of his voice; and then, when the notes prove too high for him, continuing the air in a whistle, until he has turned the impassable corner; then taking up again the song and the words, "Home! sweet Home!" and looking as if he felt their full import, ploughboy though he be. And so he does; for he is one of a large, an honest, a kind, and an industrious family, where all goes well, and where the poor ploughboy is sure of finding cheerful faces and coarse comforts-all that he has learned to desire. Oh, to be as cheaply and as thoroughly contented as George Coper! All his luxuries, a cricket-match!all his wants satisfied in "home! sweet home!"

--

Nothing but noises to-day! They are clearing Farmer Brooke's great bean-field, and crying the "Harvest Home!" in a chorus, before which all other sounds-the song, the scolding, the gunnery. fade away, and become faint echoes. A pleasant noise is that! though, for one's ears' sake, one makes some haste to get away from it. And here, in happy time, is that pretty wood, the Shaw, with its broad path-way, its tangled dingles, its nuts and its honeysuckles;-and, carrying away a fagot of those sweetest flowers, we reach Hannah Bint's of whom, and of whose doings we shall say more another time.

We did

Note.-Poor Dash is also dead. not keep him long, indeed I believe that he died of the transition from starvation to good feed, as dangerous to a dog's stomach and to most stomachs, as the less agreeable change from good feed to starvation. He has been succeeded in place and favour by another Dash, not less amiable in demeanour and far more creditable in appearance, bearing no small resemblance to the pet spaniel of my friend Master Dinely, he who stole the bone from the magpies, and who figures as the first Dash of this volume. Let not the unwary reader opine,

is going to be married! Mr. B.'s hunters are on sale-their master is going to be married! The dress-maker won't undertake to make a new gown under a fortnight-Lady C. is going to be married! The Grove is taken by a Mr. D., of whom nobody knows any thing marriages jostle: my worthy friend the Rector of Ashley, a most popular person at all times, and certainly the favourite marrier of the county, was wanted to tie the hymeneal knot the same morning by two couples who live forty miles apart; and Sir Edward E.'s wedding has been delayed for a fortnight, because that grand minister to the "pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious" bridals, the coachmaker, was going to be married himself!

that in assigning the same name to three several individuals, I am acting as an humble imitator of the inimitable writer who has given immortality to the Peppers and the Mustards, on the one hand; or showing a poverty of invention or a want of acquaintance with the bead-roll of canine appellations on the other.except that he is going to be married! Nay, I merely with my usual scrupulous fidelity take the names as I find them. The fact is, that half the handsome spaniels in England are called Dash, just as half the tall footmen are called Thomas. The name belongs to the species. Sitting in an open carriage one day last summer at the door of a farm-house where my father had some business, I saw a noble and beautiful animal of this kind lying in great state and laziness on the steps, and felt an immediate desire to make acquaintance with him. My father, who had had the same fancy, had patted him and called him "poor fellow" in passing, without eliciting the smallest notice in return. "Dash!" cried I at a venture, "good Dash! noble Dash!" and up he started in a moment, making but one spring from the door into the gig. Of course I was right in my guess. The gentleman's name was Dash.

LITTLE MISS WREN.

Nothing but wedding parties are heard of hereabouts; not to be engaged to two or three would be a sad loss of caste and of consequence. I, for my own part, have been invited by half a dozen young ladies to see them exchange their freedom for a name and for a ring," and am just returned from the most magnificent espousals that have been celebrated even in this season of wedlock.

One of the most distinguished and remarkable persons in these parts, not very fruitful of celebrated personages, is undoubtedly my fair friend Miss Philippa Wren, of Wrensnest in this county,- -a lady well known through the neighbourhood, not merely because she is an heiress of good family, and heiresses of any sort are rarities everywhere, nor because she is amiable and accomplished, as the newspapers say of heiresses and of young ladies in general; but for a quality proper and peculiar to her own individual person, that quality in short, which has procured for her the universal cognomen of little Miss Wren.

Partly, no doubt, this distinguishing charac teristic may have belonged to her by inheritance. The Wrens have been a tiny race from generation to generation, gradually diminishing in size and stature, tapering away like the point of a pyramid, until they reached the very climax of smallness in the person of their fair descendant, the least woman, not to be quite a dwarf, that ever was seen out of Lilliput.

Of all the seasons for marriages that I have ever known, this wet, dirty, snowy, frosty winter, (of 1829) with its hot fits and its cold fits, and its fogs that were neither hot nor cold, but a happy mixture of all the evils of both chilly as sleet, stifling as steam;-of all seasons, this, which having murderously slaughtered two hundred head of fine geraniums, my property, I set down as fatal!-of all the seasons that I remember, this has been the most fertile in marriages. Half the belles in our neighbourhood have disappeared,-not whisked away by fraud or force, as Lovelace carried off Clarissa, but decorously wooed and won, as Sir Charles Grandison wedded Miss Byron. Still they are gone. On Monday, a rich member of Parliament drives away to Paris with one county beauty; on Tuesday a dashing When born it was such a fairy, that nurses, Captain of Hussars sets out for Florence with doctors, aunts and grandmammas, almost lost another; on Wednesday a third glides quietly the fear of rearing in the perplexity of dressaway to a country parsonage with her hand-ing it, flung away the superb baby-linen in some bridegroom, a young clergyman. Balls despair, and were fain to wrap the young and concerts are spangled with silver favours; stranger in cotton, until the apparel of a neignwhite gloves are your only present; the pretty bouring doll could be borrowed for its service. nuptial cards knotted together with satin rib- All the gossips gazed, marvelled, and admired, bon, fly about like so many doves; and bride- and as time wore on, and the little lady of the cake is in such abundance, that even the little manor grew older, without, as it seemed, boys and girls at home for the holidays, char- growing bigger, the admiration increased. tered gluttons as they are, cry, "Hold, Every epoch of infancy was a fresh theme of enough!" village wonder. Walking and talking assumed, in her case, the form of miracles; and that such an atom should cut teeth seemed little less incredible than that Richard should

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There is no end to the shapes in which matrimony meets you. Miss A.'s servant comes to you wanting a place-her mistress

be born with them. All through her childhood, the tiny heiress passed, with every stranger that saw her, for a rare specimen of precocious talent, was my-deared, petted, fondled and noticed at eighteen, and might now at five-and-twenty, sink at least fifteen years of her age with perfect impunity, in any company in Europe.

Such a deception, however, is the farthest thing possible from her desire. She would rather, if one of the two evils must be endured, look fifteen years older. Shrewd, quick-witted, keen and capable on all other points, the peculiarity of her person has in this, as in many other instances, influenced her character and her destiny. The sole object of her ambition, "vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself," is to be great (I use the word in the purely primitive sense, large, big, and tall) in despite of nature. Even that ambitious fowl, a she-bantam, does not imitate more absurdly the magnificent demeanour of a Poland hen, than poor Miss Wren emulates the superb and dignified graces of her next neighbour, Miss Stork, a grenadier of a woman, who labours under the converse misfortune to that which has befallen herself, and stands six feet without her shoes. Never was erectness so exemplary and unrelaxing. A poker seems to poke when compared with her perpendicularity. Governesses and dancing-masters reversed, in her case, their usual lectures, complained of her inflexible uprightness, and scolded her for holding up her head. She constantly perches herself on the highest chair in the room, and stands, walks, and dances on tiptoe, a process, which, like most attempts to seem what we are not, only serves to make her calamity the more remarkable.

In her dress she practises the same mancuvres with the same ill success; wears very high bonnets with very high plumes; piles as many flowers upon her head as might serve to deck a may-pole; has heels to her boots, false bottoms to her slippers; and punctually follows, in the rest of her equipment, the fashion of her above-mentioned neighbour, Miss Stork, the ultimate object of her ambition. Frills, collars, flounces, and trimmings of all sorts are made exactly after her pattern, deducting no inch of fulness or atom of width; so that, the fair model Miss Stork herself being by no means sparing of adornments, her poor little imitator looks like a mere bundle of finery, an abridgment of the reigning fashion, and makes pretty much such a figure as a well-sized puppet might exhibit, if dressed in an extempore suit of woman's clothes cut shorter for the occasion. Remonstrance is quite out of the question. Even the omnipotent dictum of a French milliner, and the oily flattery of a lady's maid have been tried in vain on Miss Wren. She turned off her shoemaker for unpalatable praise of her little foot, for which, indeed, the famous "glass slipper"

of the Fairy Tales would hardly have been small enough; and cashiered a conscientious mantua-maker for offering to deduct a sovereign in the price of a satin cloak in consideration of its shortness. What worse could she have done had the lady of the needle been wholly honest, and deducted two sovereigns, as well she might, from the seven-guinea: cloak? I do think she would have brought an action for libel.

She inhabits large houses; sits on great chairs; rides high horses; has a Newfoundland dog for a pet; and drives a huge heavy landau, where she is perched between a tall footman and a fat coachman, and looks, when one catches sight of her, something like a minnow between a salmon and a turbot, or a goldfinch between peacock and a goose. The bigger the thing, the more she affects it: plays on the organ, although the chords are as unreachable to her delicate fingers, as Gulliver found those of his instrument at Brobdignag; paints at an easel so high that she is forced to stand on steps; and professes to read comfortably from no book smaller than a folio, though it is morally certain that she must walk backwards and forwards to compass the page. The slender jessamine hand, written with a crowquill on pink note paper, which some fine ladies cultivate so successfully, is her aversion: her letters are substantial specimens of stationery, written in a huge text hand on thick extra-post paper, and sealed with a coat of arms as big as a crown piece, - which magnificent seal, by the way, depending by a chain that might lock a wagonwheel, from a watch of her maternal grandfather as big as a saucer, she constantly wears about her person.

In flowers her taste is of equal magnitude. Dahlias, sunflowers, hollyhocks, and treeroses, together with the whole tribe of majors (minors, of course, she avoids and detests,) and all those shrubs and creepers whose blossoms are out of reach, are her favourites. She will dangle a bush of rhododendron or azalea in her hand, and wear a magnolia in her bosom for a nosegay. In her love of space, her desire for "ample room and verge enough," she has done her best to convert her pretty place of Wrensnest into a second edition of Timon's Villa, "Her pond an ocean, her parterre a down,” and in her passion for great effects would think no more of moving an oak of a century old from its native forest than I should of transplanting a daisy. Cloud-capt mountains, inaccessible rocks, and the immeasura ble ocean, are the only prospects for her; she raves of the stupendous scenery of America, and will certainly some day or other make a journey of pleasure to the Andes or the Cordilleras.

As in nature, so in art, the grand is her standard of excellence. Colossal statues, and pictures larger than life she delights in; wor

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