All these "varieties," which custom produces in words as nature does in animals, should be well understood, because a misuse or misconstruction of any them may lead to serious consequences.

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The phrase I cannot make it out," is one getting somewhat obsolete; but nevertheless it requires a little care. For instance, a lady says to her friend, "I got your note begging me to meet you at Howell and James's yesterday, at five o'clock. I assure you I would have come, but I could not make it out." A novice would perhaps imagine that it was the note the lady could not make out, an expression formerly used with regard to unintelligible writing-not so; the note she read and understood. It was the engagement she could not "make out." Why? is another question; upon which the fewer inquiries you make the better-I only guard you against the confusion of words.

There are two nearly slang phrases, and which you may never, unless in certain, and I hope very select, circles, hear from woman's lips, although it may so happen that they reach woman's ears;-these are, "coming it" and "going it." In common parlance, when they are understood, they convey the exact distinction between saying and doing a thing. Of a man who gives you a description of his own prowesshis own success-his great connexions-his numerous opportunities, and their equally numerous results-it is said, " By Jove, he is coming it strong!"- -a sort of half-and-half imputation that his Tongue and Truth are running a race, and that Tongue is the favourite. This, however, is harmless; it does no great mischief to himself, and, if his character be well known, not much more to anybody else. The other case, that of a gentleman of six hundred a-year uncertain, who keeps two or three carriages, half a score horses, and as many servants, plays high, lives splendidly, gives dinners which startle Ude, wine that makes Crocky jealous, and astonishes the natives for a certain time,-is the reverse of the former; and everybody who rides his horses, eats his entrées, and swallows his Champagne, in the brief intervals of riding, eating, and drinking, exclaims, "I say, he is going it!" The results of the two cases come off very phraseologically. The affairs of the gentleman who is in the habit of " coming it" usually come to nothing; and the gentleman who is accustomed to "go it" generally ends by going himself altogether.

There are phraseological anomalies which it is as well to observe. "Upright" and "downright," in their usual acceptation, are synonymous. People say of a worthy, honest, sober-minded citizen, that he is an excellent, upright, downright honest man; but if they wish to add something by way of climax to his virtues, they say also that he is a straightforward man; and this is invariably told you of a steady-going worthy. How far being all at once upright, downright, and straightforward is consistent with steady going, we leave ladies and gentlemen who have the delights of steam-packets before their eyes to determine; yet ainsi va la phrase.

"Creature" and "person" must be attended to as words capable of various uses. A good creature is an amiable, inoffensive twaddler, who does little odd jobs for one; who will make up a party for one's gratification without being in the slightest degree interested in it himself. A nice person is somebody one knows very little of, but who conducts either himself or herself without any glaring impropriety, and

does nothing but assent to every proposition made in society. You ought always to have one or two nice persons in a party, inasmuch as they will be found infinitely less nice than their neighbours, and will fall into all the suggestions of their companions.

Never" my Lord" or "my Lady" a nobleman or noblewoman more than once in a day, unless you wish to be taken for a footman; and never talk of a 66 gentleman;"" I and another gentleman were going to the Opera," "I met a gentleman who told me this ;" or a gentleman called on me, and told me that." This peculiarity of expression would seem to infer that the man whom you met, or who called upon you, was a gentleman, and that you are not. Call ladies, ladies; but never call a gentleman, however much of a gentleman he be, more than a man; and if you wish to live in any society above that of chimney-sweepers, never call a woman a "female."

Conventional expressions must be well noticed. A déjeûner, called so from being the first and earliest meal of the day, according to modern acceptation, is the third, and sometimes the last, inasmuch as, in wellregulated society, it begins at about seven o'clock in the evening, and lasts till four the next morning. In a similar way, the word "early" upon a card interdicts your visit till after midnight; and the words "small party ensure a crowd so great as to render moving impossible in any of the rooms, even if you succeed in reaching the top of the staircase.

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The peculiar duties of toadies and gooseberry-pickers are too well known to need any explanation. Anybody who requires enlightenment will be sure to find one of either class in every well-regulated family. A tame man " is also essential in an establishment,-a middle-aged person, perhaps on the half-pay of the army, married, but whose wife is an invalid, a perfect " gentleman," but thoroughly safe, who has to take care of one's daughters, and find their shawls, and call up the carriage. He is an ambidextrous creature," inasmuch as, while he is performing these essential offices in the evening, he is always to be kept dangling and dawdling about the house in the day-time, to spoil tête-àtêtes, which are not considered judicious for the misses; or, if occasion require, to keep a sharp look-out after the other class of dandies who call upon the mamma. He is also to sit at the bottom of the table, and carve, if wanted. It is only in the particular of being useful to both husband and wife that the tame man differs from the gooseberry-picker.

Never inquire who anybody is, if you happen not to know: there are secrets in all families. Everybody has a cousin, or a niece, or a nephew -Cardinals always have. Never talk of any unhappy event which has occurred, a suicide, a crim.-con., or even an execution, or anything of the kind, because, in a well-regulated society of a dozen people, the chances are that the " cap fits;" and now that introductions are superseded, and that every man must feel his own way, the less you hazard in the way of general observation the better.

Always keep in mind that admirable scene in one of Foote's farces"The Nabob "-in which the hero, Sir Matthew Mite, says to the mayor and deputation from the borough of Brib'em, which he is anxious to represent in Parliament,

"The man who breaks his word with such faithful and honest adherents richly deserves a halter. Gentlemen, in my opinion he deserves to be hanged.

Touchit. Hush, Sir Matthew!-have a care what you say.

Mite. What is the matter?

T. You see the fat man there behind: he will be returning officer at the election.

M. What then?

T. On a gibbet at the end of our town there hangs a smuggler for robbing the custom-house.

M. Well?

T. The mayor's own brother, your honour. Now perhaps he may be jealous that you meant to throw some reflection on him or his family.

M. Not unlikely.-I say, Gentlemen, whoever violates his promise to such faithful friends as you are, in my poor opinion deserves to be d-d. T. That's right, Sir Matthew, stick to that; for though the Christian club may have some fear of the gallows, they don't value the other thing a farthing."

The illustration, which I have softened down with a prudence and propriety quite meritorious, is not a bad one for my position; and with this, for the present, I terminate my paper, promising a continuation of my hints for conversation at the earliest possible period.

MARTIAL IN LONDON,

The New Cook on trial at Fleming House.

My Lords, an objection I've plump'd on ;
Your sentence must yet be delay'd:
The hearing can't take place at Brompton,
The venue 's improperly laid.

When Dutchmen in England are warring,
To check of oppression the fears,
The jury's half English, half foreign,
The nobleman's tried by his peers.

That lawyer is reckon'd half-witted
Who fails what I mention to know;

The culprit is often acquitted
By pleading the locus in quô.

Then nonsuit this case; be impartial,
And send it to Portsmouth instead:

In trying a cook by court-martial,
The court must be held at Spithead.

Blue Ink.

You ask me, Edward, what I think
Of this new fashionable ink?
I'll answer briefly, Ned.
Methinks it will be always blue;
At all events, when used by you,
It never will be red.

REFLECTIONS ON SOME OF THE GREAT MEN OF THE REIGN OF CHARLES THE FIRST.

BY LEIGH.HUNT.

Ir is a "discipline of humanity" to look back upon a reign like that of Charles the First, and consider the circumstances that made the actors in it what they were; the mixture of good and ill in almost all of them, (most probably in all, if we knew all,) and how they failed and succeeded, in whatsoever they really did fail or succeed in, according to the earnestness with which they pursued their object, and its fitness for the sanction of their fellow-creatures. I beg leave to say, if I may say it without immodesty, and upon the strength of my own earnestness, that I use none of these words at random; and that I take the closing sentence in particular to contain matter worthy of serious reflection.

Considerations of this kind are the more interesting, inasmuch as they take us among those private portions of men's lives with which history is not sufficiently conversant. History, indeed, will most probably be written, by-and-by, in a far different spirit than it has yet evinced, even in the hands of the most philosophic; among whom, for example, is not to be counted Hume, setting aside even his partialities, and notwithstanding his just claims to the reputation of a philosophical temper in his miscellaneous writings. Hume occupies himself, almost as exclusively as any other historian, in saying little but of wars, and courts, and church governments, and what have been exclusively called "public matters; as if the private and daily well-being of the community were not only the sole end of all public matters, but necessary to be constantly and strikingly kept in view, for fear the public agents should forget that sole end, and be induced by the sounds of their own voices, their courtesies to one another, and the glitter of their state, to think that everything really important begins and ends with themselves. It will no longer do to regard the majority as little better than subject-matter to talk about and to work with-a minor humanity, that may take its chance as it can. As a small, and yet really voluminous specimen of Hume's unphilosophical spirit in his history, and his failing to look at public matters with domestic eyes, it may be observed that he thinks it necessary to make a sort of dandy apology for mentioning the celebrated anecdote. of the cake-burning in the history of King Alfred. There are other anecdotes which he might have obtained from the same authentic source, and of the existence of which he has not given a hint, though they are absolutely necessary to a thorough understanding of the character of that great man; a man, whom prosperity, as well as adversity, had tried in fires, of which his admirers, in general, know nothing, and which showed him to be made of the commonest clay with us all, before suffering and self-reflection had exalted it. The curious reader may find them in the life left us of him by his friend Bishop Asser, or in the passages translated from it by Mr. Sharon Turner in his valuable history of the Anglo-Saxons. I should not be content with referring to them here; but space, and the immediate subject, will not allow me to do more. . To take Charles the First himself as a specimen of the way in which

histories have been generally written: the authors do not tell us half enough of his private history, or the circumstances of his birth and breeding; not excepting the panegyrists who so naturally and justly tell more than others of his taste for the fine arts, and the readiness of his discourse. A true vindicator of him, just to him and to all, would begin with tracing the mingled weakness and elegance of his character to his father, the son of the clever Mary and the foolish Darnley,-the bornking, shattered before his birth by the murder of Rizzio; he would then refer to the "king-craft," on which this father piqued himself, and which the son had not strength of mind to avoid; to the grosser paternal follies, which he did avoid, (for children, not unintelligent, generally go counter to the vices for which they see their parents despised;) to the masques and other elegancies of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones; to the ascendancy of Buckingham, whose mixture of openness and generosity with his insolence, and, above all, whose presence of mind and address, resulting from the admiration caused by his beauty, gave him an advantage over less heartily constituted natures; to the book-learning, which was cultivated in Charles as a younger brother not expecting the throne; to the defects of his person, (for his legs were somewhat bowed,) which tend to make a man at once bashful and obstinate,-bashful from the fear of contempt, and obstinate in resenting it; and last, perhaps not least, to the early government of his mother, Anne of Denmark, who appears to have been a woman of the most commonplace order, anxious only for ordinary pleasures and petty rights, and most probably letting her child have his way whenever it suited her indolence, and violently contesting power with him when the whim took her to make herself "respected."

Now, for the same reason that one would like to know how the people in Charles's reign passed their daily lives, of whatsoever rank,-what they did from morning to night-and how they suffered, or profited, in those ordinary moments of which existence is made up, from the adminis tration of "public affairs," (their affairs, that is to say,) it would be pleasant to know more about the private life of Charles also,-himself a private individual as far as he was a man, and far more interesting to our final sympathies under that aspect, then inasmuch as he was a king; for royalty is a sort of match for adversity, let it be treated never so ill. Its exclusive character gives its exclusive aids. In holding itself aloof from us, or treating us imperiously, it tells us that it can afford to do so, and accordingly we so leave it; but when the tears come, or ordinary human smiles, or when we picture to ourselves the daily amount of cares, pleasures, and pastimes, and consider how far royalty allows or deprives its possessor of these, then it is that we learn best how to feel for the man, notwithstanding the splendour, or in despite of the drawbacks, of the king. Every king, the most kingly, spends his time far more as a fellow-creature than a sovereign; eats, drinks, laughs, reads, thinks, or does not think, and has his passions and humours, his inferiorities or superiorities to those about him, just like ourselves; and the real historical estimate of the most historical character is correct, therefore, in proportion as we know most of the human being, under the circumstances in which the far greater part of its life is passed. It would be pleasant to hear all which the real historian of Charles could discover for us, by his re→ search either into character or documents; and I will venture to add, that not only in Charles's instance, but in that of every public person