deration of its shortness. What worse could she have done had the lady of the needle been wholly honest, and deducted two sovereigns, as well she might, from the seven-guinea cloak? I do think she would have brought an action for libel. She inhabits large houses; sits on great chairs; rides high horses; has a Newfoundland dog for a pet; and drives a huge heavy landau, where she is perched between a tall footman and a fat coachman, and looks, when one catches sight of her, something like a minnow between a salmon and a turbot, or a goldfinch between a peacock and a goose. The bigger the thing, the more she affects it: plays on the organ, although the chords are as unreachable to her delicate fingers, as Gulliver found those of his instrument at Brobdignag; paints at an easel so high that she is forced to stand on steps; and professes to read comfortably from no book smaller than a folio, though it is morally certain that she must walk backwards and forwards to compass the page. The slender jessamine hand, written with a crowquill on pink note paper, which some fine ladies cultivate so successfully, is her aversion, her letters are substantial specimens of stationery, written in a huge text hand on thick extrapost paper, and sealed with a coat of arms as big as a crown piece,-which magnificent seal, by the way, depending by a chain that might lock a waggon-wheel, from a watch of her maternal grandfather as big as a saucer, she constantly wears about her person. In flowers her taste is of equal magnitude. Dahlias, sunflowers, hollyhocks, and tree-roses, together with the whole tribe of majors (minors, of course she avoids and detests,) and all those shrubs and creepers whose blossoms are out of reach, are her favourites. She will dangle a bush of rhododendron or azalea in her hand, and wear a magnolia in her bosom for a nosegay. In her love of space, her desire for " ample room and "she has done her best to convert verge enough,' her pretty place of Wrensnest into a second edition of Timon's Villa " Her pond an ocean, her parterre a down," and in her passion for great effects would think no more of moving an oak of a century old from its native forest than I should of transplanting a daisy. Cloud-capt mountains, inaccessible rocks, and the immeasureable ocean, are the only prospects for her; she raves of the stupendous scenery of America, and will certainly some day or other make a journey of pleasure to the Andes or the Cordilleras. As in nature, so in art, the grand is her standard of excellence. Colossal statues, and pictures larger than life she delights in; worships Martin, adores Michael Angelo, prefers St. Peter's to the Parthenon, and the Farnese Hercules to the Apollo Belvidere. When she dies, she will desire a pyramid for her mausoleum. The dome of St. Paul's, which served her celebrated namesake, would hardly satisfy her ambition.-But why do I talk of tombs and of namesakes? Am I not just come from the wedding breakfast? and is not "Little Miss Wren" Miss Wren no longer? Even whilst I write, bells are ringing, horses prancing, bridemaids simpering, and wedding-cake travelling nine times through the Baroness Blankenhausen's fairy ring. The bridegroom is a fair well-conditioned Saxon, six feet three inches high, and broad in proportion, with a superb genealogical tree, quarterings innumerable, and an estate by no means suitable to his dimensions for the rest, remarkable for nothing except his great turn for silence, the number of segars which he puffs away in the course of the day, and two little Marlborough spaniels which he is accustomed to carry about in his coat pockets. I hope he won't put his wife there. Really the temptation will be strong; but the Baron is a giant of grace, a well-mannered monster; and to judge from the carefulness and delicacy with which he lifted his fair bride over a puddle in the churchyard, to save her white satin shoes (she protesting all the time against such a display of his gallantry, and declaring that she could have stept over the pool had it been twice as wide),—to judge from that coup d'essai in husbandship, I see no cause to doubt that he will treat my friend as tenderly and gingerly, as if he were a little girl of six years old, and the fair Philippa his first wax doll. : Persons of the larger size are often very silent. An ingenious friend of mine holds a theory that the desirable quantity of animal spirits is originally distributed pretty equally amongst men; but that it is lost, absorbed, and diluted in people of unusual bulk, and only shines forth in full vigour in those of a smaller frame as the glass of alcohol, which will powerfully impregnate a pint of water, will be scarcely perceived in a gallon. For instance, (waiving particular examples, of which he brought many,) he holds that a company of light infantry would prove far more vivacious than a troop of life-guards; and has no hesitation in asserting that the famous tall regiment of Frederick the Great must have been the dullest part of the whole Prussian army. do not answer for the truth of his assertion, though my friend makes out a very good case, as your clever theorist seldom fails to do, right or wrong. Indeed I brought Falstaff as a case in point against him. He admitted the mere bulk, the "huge rotundity," and the quantity of animal spirits that distinguished the witty knight, "but then," added he, "I am sure he was short." 1 WALKS IN THE COUNTRY. HANNAH BINT. THE Shaw, leading to Hannah Bint's habitation, is, as I perhaps have said before, a very pretty mixture of wood and coppice; that is to say, a track of thirty or forty acres covered with fine growing timber-ash, and oak, and elm-very regularly planted; and interspersed here and there with large patches of underwood, hazel, maple, birch, holly, and hawthorn, woven into almost impenetrable thickets by long wreaths of the bramble, the briony, and the briar-rose, or by the pliant and twisting garlands of the wild honey-suckle. In other parts, the Shaw is quite clear of its bosky undergrowth, and clothed only with large beds of feathery fern, or carpets of flowers, primroses, orchises, cowslips, ground-ivy, crane's bill, cottongrass, Solomon's seal, and forget-me-not, crowded together with a profusion and brilliancy of colour, such as I have rarely seen equalled even in a garden. Here the wild hyacinth really enamels the ground with its fresh and lovely purple; there, "On aged roots, with bright green mosses clad, The variety is much greater than I have enumerated; for the ground is so unequal, now swelling in gentle ascents, now dimpling into dells and hollows, and the soil so different in different parts, that the sylvan Flora is unusually extensive and complete. The season is, however, now too late for this floweriness; and except the tufted woodbines, which have continued in bloom during the whole of this lovely autumn, and some lingering garlands of the purple wild-veitch, wreathing round the thickets, and uniting with the ruddy leaves of the bramble, and the pale festoons of the briony, there is little to call one's attention from the grander beauties of the trees-the sycamore, its broad leaves already spotted-the oak, heavy with acorns-and the delicate shining rind of the weeping birch, "the lady of the woods," thrown out in strong relief from a back-ground of holly and hawthorn, each studded with coral berries, and backed with old beeches, beginning to assume the rich, tawny hue which makes them perhaps the most picturesque of autumnal trees, as the transparent freshness of their young foliage is undoubtedly the choicest ornament of the forest in spring. A sudden turn round one of these magnificent beeches brings us to the boundary of the Shaw, and leaning upon a rude gate, we look over an open space of about ten acres of ground, still more varied and broken than that which we have passed, and surrounded on all sides by thick woodland. As a piece of colour, nothing can be well finer. The ruddy glow of the heath-flower, contrasting, on the one hand, with the golden-blossomed furze -on the other, with a patch of buck-wheat, of which the bloom is not past, although the grain be |