where not, to pick up pictures, and such gauds.  On these occasions he mostly stoppeth me, to read a short lecture on the advantage a person like me possesses above himself, in having his time occupied with business which he must do—­assureth me that he often feels it hang heavy on his hands—­wishes he had fewer holidays—­and goes off—­Westward Ho!—­chanting a tune, to Pall Mall—­perfectly convinced that he has convinced me—­while I proceed in my opposite direction tuneless.

It is pleasant again to see this Professor of Indifference doing the honours of his new purchase, when he has fairly housed it.  You must view it in every light, till he has found the best—­placing it at this distance, and at that, but always suiting the focus of your sight to his own.  You must spy at it through your fingers, to catch the aerial perspective—­though you assure him that to you the landscape shows much more agreeable without that artifice.  Wo be to the luckless wight, who does not only not respond to his rapture, but who should drop an unseasonable intimation of preferring one of his anterior bargains to the present!—­The last is always his best hit—­his “Cynthia of the minute.”—­Alas! how many a mild Madonna have I known to come in—­a Raphael!—­keep its ascendancy for a few brief moons—­then, after certain intermedial degradations, from the front drawing-room to the back gallery, thence to the dark parlour,—­adopted in turn by each of the Carracci, under successive lowering ascriptions of filiation, mildly breaking its fall—­consigned to the oblivious lumber-room, go out at last a Lucca Giordano, or plain Carlo Maratti!—­which things when I beheld—­musing upon the chances and mutabilities of fate below, hath made me to reflect upon the altered condition of great personages, or that woful Queen of Richard the Second—­

                     —­set forth in pomp,
  She came adorned hither like sweet May. 
  Sent back like Hollowmass or shortest day.

With great love for you, J.E. hath but a limited sympathy with what you feel or do.  He lives in a world of his own, and makes slender guesses at what passes in your mind.  He never pierces the marrow of your habits.  He will tell an old established play-goer, that Mr. Such-a-one, of So-and-so (naming one of the theatres), is a very lively comedian—­as a piece of news!  He advertised me but the other day of some pleasant green lanes which he had found out for me, knowing me to be a great walker, in my own immediate vicinity—­who have haunted the identical spot any time these twenty years!  He has not much respect for that class of feelings which goes by the name of sentimental.  He applies the definition of real evil to bodily sufferings exclusively—­and rejecteth all others as imaginary.  He is affected by the sight, or the bare supposition, of a creature in pain, to a degree which I have never witnessed out of womankind.  A constitutional acuteness