ling degree. You can tell a Stultz coat any where, which is quite enough to damn it: the moment a man's known by an invariable cut, and that not original, it ought to be all over with him. Give me the man who makes the tailor, not the tailor who makes the man."

66

Right, by G-!" cried Sir Willoughby, who was as badly dressed as one of Sir E

-'s din

ners. "Right; just my opinion. I have always told my Schneiders to make my clothes neither in the fashion nor out of it; to copy no other man's coat, and to cut their cloth according to my natural body, not according to an isosceles triangle. Look at this coat, for instance," and Sir Willoughby Townshend made a dead halt, that we might admire his garment the more accurately.

"Coat!" said Russelton, with an appearance of the most naïve surprise, and taking hold of the collar, suspiciously, by the finger and thumb; "coat, Sir Willoughby! do you call this thing a coat ?"

CHAPTER XXXII.

J'ai toujours cru que le bon n'étoit que le beau mis en action.

ROUSSEAU.

SHORTLY after Russelton's answer to Sir Willoughby's eulogistic observations on his own attire, I left those two worthies till I was to join them at dinner; it wanted three hours yet to that time, and I repaired to my quarters to bathe and write letters. I scribbled one to Madame D'Anville, full of antitheses and maxims, sure to charm her; another to my mother, to prepare her for my arrival, and a third to Lord Vincent, giving him certain commissions at Paris, which I had forgotten personally to execute.

My pen is not that of a ready writer; and what

with yawning, stretching, admiring my rings, and putting pen to paper, in the intervals of these more natural occupations, it was time to bathe and dress before my letters were completed. I set off to Russelton's abode in high spirits, and fully resolved to make the most of a character so original,

;

It was a very small room in which I found him he was stretched in an easy chair before the fireplace, gazing complacently at his feet, and apparently occupied in any thing but listening to Sir Willoughby Townshend, who was talking with great vehemence about politics and the corn laws. Notwithstanding the heat of the weather, there was a small fire on the hearth, which, aided by the earnestness of his efforts to convince his host, put poor Sir Willoughby into a most intense perspiration. Russelton, however, seemed enviably cool, and hung over the burning wood like a cucumber on a hotbed. Sir Willoughby came to a full stop by the window, and (gasping for breath) attempted to throw it open.

"What are you doing? for Heaven's sake, what

are you doing?" cried Russelton, starting up; "do you mean to kill me?"

"Kill you!" said Sir Willoughby, quite aghast. "Yes; kill me! is it not quite cold enough already in this d-d seafaring place, without making my only retreat, humble as it is, a theatre for thorough draughts? Have I not had the rheumatism in my left shoulder, and the ague in my little finger, these last six months? and must you now terminate my miserable existence at one blow, by opening that abominable lattice? Do you think, because your great frame, fresh from the Yorkshire wolds, and compacted of such materials, that one would think, in eating your beeves, you had digested their hides into skin-do you think, because your limbs might be cut up into planks for a seventy-eight, and warranted water-proof without pitch, because of the density of their pores do you think, because you are as impervious as an araphorostic shoe, that I, John Russelton, am equally impenetrable, and that you are to let easterly winds play about my room like children,

begetting rheums and asthmas and all manner of catarrhs? I do beg, Sir Willoughby Townshend, that you will suffer me to die a more natural and civilized death;" and so saying, Russelton sank down into his chair, apparently in the last state of exhaustion.

Sir Willoughby, who remembered the humour ist in all his departed glory, and still venerated him as a temple where the deity yet breathed, though the altar was overthrown, made to this extraordinary remonstrance no other reply than a long whiff, and a "Well, Russelton, dash my wig (a favourite oath of Sir W.'s) but you're a queer fellow."

Russelton now turned to me, and invited me, with a tone of the most lady-like languor, to sit down near the fire. As I am naturally of a chilly disposition, and fond, too, of beating people in their own line, I drew a chair close to the hearth, declared the weather was very cold, and rung the bell for some more wood. Russelton stared for a moment, and then, with a politeness he had not