always going to throw himself over Waterloo Bridge. This is when his literary vein is comic. When, as sometimes happens, a brief ray of sunshine comes upon him, he goes home, skipping like the little hills; and, sitting down, indites the most mournful and tear-compelling ditties you can conceive. Mr. Nedwards says, however, that he believes him to be a true poet, which accounts for all these little inconsistencies. He tells me, too, of another popular literary cha. racter, who, by the immense amount of work he gets through, and his painfully minute and symmetrical handwriting, might be thought the most methodical and the most industrious writer of the day. In his works he tries to be alternately funny and sentimental, from which I was inclined at first to put him down as a poet too; but, according to Mr. Nedwards, he is a brawling, fractious, disorderly, indolent man; he hasn't a grain of sentiment in him; his fun is a perversity of humour-wit with a hump, indeed; that as for his sentiment, there lives not a profounder cynic: one who keeps a commonplace book of pathetic phrases; was never touched by anybody's woe, save when, by relieving it, he could minister to his own vanity, and placing the summum bonum of his enjoyment in a choice flask of wine and a rare cigar. Oh, for the anomalies, the contradictions, and the sorry reverses to the most brilliant of medals!

You say you met the eminent light littérateur, Ethelred Guffoon, at an evening party recently; and his conversation was charming, and chiefly relating to the coming Exhibition of the Royal Academy, and the approaching Italian Opera season. My angel, the Dowager Lady Aholibah-who is here, and who interests herself so much in Assyrian antiquities-knows Ethelred Guffoon very well. He criticised her book, "Cuneiform Inscriptions not Comical Cuts," which created so great a sensation in the literary world, in one of

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the papers he writes for, last autumn. She says that the man, from ten to four, is one of the rigidest red-tapists imaginable, and ties himself to his desk till the dead letters enter into his soul; and that, after he has fluttered for a while at theatres, and balls, and parties, he goes home and works like a galley slave at his light literature till the dawn make the chimneys look like tall ghosts. How do men live through this work, through this incessant strain of body and brain? for such a man seems to work as hard with his hands as a pavior, and with his mind as a college student cramming for his examination. But clever Mr. Nedwards-he is going away next week, and I am so sorry-says that such captives in the carcere duro of the office and the study grow grey early, and sometimes go crazy and die. Mr. Nedwards that he will never kill himself with hard work, and I don't believe he ever will.

says

He is going away, I have said, next week. Next week! Are we not all going away next week? Whither we know not. And these letters-for them also it is the season to say tempus abire. I have wearied my Louisa and her friends long enough, and next week there will be one unwelcome guest the less among her correspondents. Ah! questa settimana prossima! What notable things we have all in our time set down to be done "next week!" Next week the outhouse was to be slated, and the lock of that writing-desk, of which we had lost the key, was to be looked to; the papers of which we were in quest are mouldering in the desk now. Next week we would positively write to poor dear imprudent Fanny, who disgraced herself and grieved her family so by marrying Grimwood, the dissipated subaltern in an African regiment. Fanny's poverty, and dearness, and imprudence are all covered over and forgotten now beneath a few layers of sand and slab in the cemetery of Cape Coast Castle. Next

week, the consumptive gasps out, that she will be quite well and strong, and will pay that long-deferred visit down in Dorsetshire; and next day the doctor goes out at one door, and Death comes in at the other, and says, "It is enough," and beckons the sufferer away. The five-pound loans that were to be repaid; the three-volume novels and grave histories that were to be commenced; the good resolves that were positively to be put in operation-and all next week! My news-agent once sent me a periodical called "Next Week," and which professedly anticipated the events of the next seven days. After a while he ceased to send it. Is the periodical dead, I wonder, or will its publication be resumed "next week?" Oh! mortal men and women, we should be certain of the sands that yet remain in the upper chamber of the glass ere we so glibly hypothecate the resources of next week. There may not be grains sufficient to last another day. Now, thirteen times taking my pen to write these letters, I have said, "Next week Louisa shall have a worthier communication from her mamma. Next week I will be wise; next week I will be eloquent; next week I will say something." Ah! vain the thought, "that posterity shall not willingly let die." Do you remember that when poor Madame Roland was led to execution in '93, at the very foot of the guillotine, she asked for pen and paper, that she "might write the strange thoughts that were in her?" She was coarsely refused; and bourreau Samson did his spiriting act ungently, as was his wont. Who knows but that some of these "strange thoughts " may have risen within the breast of Jeanne Marie Phlipon Roland eight days before, and that she had said, "Well, next week they shall be written?" And next week came, and with it the tumbril, and Samson, and the guillotine. There are to be henceforth no next weeks for me.

I began these lines with some poor reflections, and I find myself in the midst of a letter which offers no definite prospect of a rational termination. Let it be, therefore, a Letter without End. A ship, the naval architects say, should properly consist of three portions-the "entrance," the "body," and the "run"-something like exordium, argument, and peroration, I think. The preponderance of strength, wise ship-builders tell us, should be in the middle. Alas! I look upon my poor little bark, and find it equally weak in every part-the "entrance" as feeble as the "run," the run as the body." Peradventure it would have been better to have called the entire collection "Letters without End," instead of reserving that mystic title for the concluding one. Might not, indeed, the letters from a mother to her daughter be prolonged ad infinitum? I, who am so aged; you, who are so young and inexperienced: surely our epistolary intercommunication might have been prolonged till this hand stiffened, and I could hold the pen no longer. Had Madame de Sévigné lived longer-forgive me even for mentioning the name of that rare woman in the same breath with my humble self-do you suppose that she would not have covered innumerable reams of paper with shrewd observations, worldly counsels, and sparkling bonmots? But the pert French writer had this advantage, among a thousand others, over me, that she wrote from the capital of the world's civilisation and gaiety, to a daughter ensevelie au fond de sa province-buried, as it were, in a dull and remote country seat; whereas I write from my dreary hermitage and sad captivity at Pumpwell here to my dear girl, who lives in the midst of London's uproar and excitement. Moreover, the Dame de Sévigné's daughter was married, and she could in many instances, and for many reasons for one, was she not a Frenchwoman, and of Louis Quatorze's court?-be more communicative than can I.

Again, the staple of correspondence and conversation in that age was scandal, and, more or less, malignant tittletattle. I appeal to my Louisa to free me from the charge of having wilfully traduced or aspersed the character of any one in Pumpwell. I have not even been so slyly satirical, or borne so hardly on the foibles of my fellow-creatures as you have, Miss, occasionally, in your letters to me. 'Tis true the majority of people here are too old and ugly to talk scandal about. Yet, dull and confined as is the world of an invalidit commences at the bolster and ends at the foot of the sofa, my world-these letters might yet have been without end. Perhaps on a dozen special topics have I discoursed to you. I have a list of at least five hundred which I could tell off at once without faltering, as they say old Church-History Fuller could the shop-signs on the right and left-hand sides of Fleet Street, in days when every shop had its sign. The time I've lost in quibbling; the things I have left undone; the little rays of light I might have shed on subjects yet cimmerian black to Louisa Chesterfield! The two brief papers on education should properly have expanded into half-a-dozen; and there should have been intercalary chapters on teething, on the measles, on the best playthings for children-ah! I must write that letter on playthings some day-on nursery rhymes, on juvenile dress and diet, on ghost stories, and on infantile perception and the best methods of quickening it. I have not said half enough about dress; have but barely glanced and then only to make your younger and more foolish friends indignant-at crinoline's voluminous theme; and have not said a word about morning-wrappers, the art of putting on a bonnet, or the best way of dressing the back hair.

Your dîner à la Russe I have, indeed, expatiated on; but where are my sage counsels regarding the attributes and