poverty there can be no disguise.  No woman dresses below herself from caprice.  The truth must out without shuffling.  “She is plainly related to the L——­s; or what does she at their house?” She is, in all probability, your wife’s cousin.  Nine times out of ten, at least, this is the case.  Her garb is something between a gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently predominates.  She is most provokingly humble, and ostentatiously sensible to her inferiority.  He may require to be repressed sometimes—­aliquando sufflaminandus erat—­but there is no raising her.  You send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped—­after the gentlemen.  Mr. ——­ requests the honour of taking wine with her; she hesitates between Port and Madeira, and chooses the former—­because he does.  She calls the servant Sir; and insists on not troubling him to hold her plate.  The housekeeper patronizes her.  The children’s governess takes upon her to correct her, when she has mistaken the piano for a harpsichord.

Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable instance of the disadvantages, to which this chimerical notion of affinity constituting a claim to acquaintance, may subject the spirit of a gentleman.  A little foolish blood is all that is betwixt him and a lady of great estate.  His stars are perpetually crossed by the malignant maternity of an old woman, who persists in calling him “her son Dick.”  But she has wherewithal in the end to recompense his indignities, and float him again upon the brilliant surface, under which it had been her seeming business and pleasure all along to sink him.  All men, besides, are not of Dick’s temperament.  I knew an Amlet in real life, who, wanting Dick’s buoyancy, sank indeed.  Poor W——­ was of my own standing at Christ’s, a fine classic, and a youth of promise.  If he had a blemish, it was too much pride; but its quality was inoffensive; it was not of that sort which hardens the heart, and serves to keep inferiors at a distance; it only sought to ward off derogation from itself.  It was the principle of self-respect carried as far as it could go, without infringing upon that respect, which he would have every one else equally maintain for himself.  He would have you to think alike with him on this topic.  Many a quarrel have I had with him, when we were rather older boys, and our tallness made us more obnoxious to observation in the blue clothes, because I would not thread the alleys and blind ways of the town with him to elude notice, when we have been out together on a holiday in the streets of this sneering and prying metropolis.  W——­ went, sore with these notions, to Oxford, where the dignity and sweetness of a scholar’s life, meeting with the alloy of a humble introduction, wrought in him a passionate devotion to the place, with a profound aversion from the society.  The servitor’s gown (worse than his school array) clung to him with Nessian venom.  He thought himself ridiculous in a garb, under which Latimer must have walked erect;