a Londoner, and therefore it would be strange if he did not know more of law, eloquence, art, philosophy, acting, than any one without his local advantages, and who is merely from the country. This is a non sequitur, and it constantly appears so when put to the test.

A real Cockney is the poorest creature in the world; the most literal, the most mechanical, and yet he too lives in a world of romance—a fairy land of his own. He is a citizen of London; and this abstraction leads his imagination the finest dance in the world. London is the first city on the habitable globe; and therefore he must be superior to every one who lives out of it. There are more people in London than any where else; and though a dwarf in stature, his person swells out and expands into ideal importance and borrowed magnitude. He resides in a garret or in a two pair of stairs' back room; yet he talks of the magnificence of London, and gives himself airs of consequence upon it, as if all the houses in Portman or in Grosvenor Square were his by right or in reversion. "He is owner of all he surveys." The Monument, the Tower of London, St. James's Palace, the Mansion House, Whitehall, are part and parcel of his being.

Let us suppose him to be a lawyer's clerk at half-a-guinea a week: but he knows the Inns of Court, the Temple Gardens, and Gray's Inn Passage; sees the lawyers in their wigs walking up and down Chancery Lane; and has advanced within half a dozen yards of the chancellor's chair:who can doubt that he understands (by implication) every point of law (however intri

cate) better than the most expert country practitioner? He is a shopman, and nailed all day behind the counter; but he sees hundreds and thousands of gay, well dressed people pass-an endless phantasmagoria—and enjoys their liberty and gaudy fluttering pride. He is a footman— but he rides behind beauty, through a crowd of carriages, and visits a thousand shops. Is he a tailor? The stigma on his profession is lost in the elegance of the patterns he provides, and of the persons he adorns; and he is something very different from a mere country botcher. Nay, the very scavenger and nightman thinks the dirt in the street has something precious in it, and his employment is solemn, silent, sacred, peculiar to London! A barker in Monmouth Street, a slopseller in Ratcliffe Highway, a tapster at a night cellar, a beggar in St. Giles's, a drab in Fleet Ditch, live in the eyes of millions, and eke out a dreary, wretched, scanty, or loathsome existence from the gorgeous, busy, glowing scene around them. It is a common saying among such persons, that "they had rather be hanged in London than die a natural death out of it any where else." Such is the force of habit and imagination. Even the eye of childhood is dazzled and delighted with the polished splendour of the jewellers' shops, the neatness of the turnery ware, the festoons of artificial flowers, the confectionery, the chymists' shops, the lamps, the horses, the carriages, the sedan-chairs: to this was formerly added a set of traditional associations-Whittington and his Cat, Guy Faux and the Gunpowder Treason, the Fire and the Plague of London, and

the Heads of the Scotch Rebels that were stuck on Temple Bar in 1745. These have vanished; and in their stead the curious and romantic eye must be content to pore in Pennant for the site of old London Wall, or to peruse the sentimental mile-stone that marks the distance to the place "where Hicks's Hall formerly stood."

The Cockney lives in a go-cart of local prejudices and positive illusions; and when he is turned out of it, he hardly knows how to stand or move. He ventures through Hyde Park Corner as a cat crosses a gutter. The trees pass by the coach very oddly. The country has a strange blank appearance: it is not lined with houses all the way, like London. He comes to places he never saw or heard of. He finds the world is bigger than he thought it. He might have dropped from the moon, for any thing he knows of the matter. He is mightily disposed to laugh, but is half afraid of making some blunder. Between sheepishness and conceit, he is in a very ludicrous situation. He finds that the people walk on two legs, and wonders to hear them talk a dialect so different from his own. He perceives London fashions have got down into the country before him, and that some of the better sort are dressed as well as he is. A drove of pigs or cattle stopping the road is a very troublesome interruption: a crow in a field, a magpie in a hedge, are to him very odd animals-he can't tell what to make of them, or how they live. He does not altogether like the accommodation at the inns-it is not what he has been used to in town. He begins to be communicative-says

he was "born within the sound of Bow bell;" and attempts some jokes, at which nobody laughs. He asks the coachman a question, to which he receives no answer. All this is to him very unaccountable and unexpected. He arrives at his journey's end; and instead of being the great man he anticipated among his friends and country relations, finds that they are barely civil to him, or make a butt of him; have topics of their own which he is as completely ignorant of as they are indifferent to what he says, so that he is glad to get back to London again, where he meets with his favourite indulgences and associates, and fancies the whole world is occupied with what he hears and sees.

A Cockney loves a tea-garden in summer, as he loves a play or the cider-cellar in winter; where he sweetens the air with the fumes of tobacco, and makes it echo to the sound of his own voice. This kind of suburban retreat is a most agreeable relief to the close and confined air of a city life. The imagination, long pent up behind a counter or between brick walls, with noisome smells and dingy objects, cannot bear at once to launch into the boundless expanse of the country, but "shorter excursions tries," coveting something between the two, and finding it at White Conduit House, or the Rosemary Branch, or Bagnigge Wells. The landlady is seen at a bow-window in near perspective, with punch-bowls and lemons disposed orderly around

-the lime-trees or poplars wave overhead to "catch the breezy air," through which, typical of the huge dense cloud that hangs over the

metropolis, curls up the thin, blue, odoriferous vapour of Virginia or Oronooko; the benches are ranged in rows, the fields and hedge-rows spread out their verdure; Hampstead and Highgate are seen in the background, and contain the imagination within gentle limits-here the holiday people are playing ball-here they are playing bowls-here they are quaffing ale, there sipping tea-here the loud wager is heard, there the political debate. In a sequestered nook a slender youth, with purple face and drooping head, nodding over a glass of gin toddy, breathes in tender accents

"There's nought so sweet on earth

As Love's young dream."

While "Rosy Ann" takes its turn; and "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled" is thundering forth in accents that might wake the dead. In another part sits carpers and critics, who dispute the score of the reckoning or the game, or cavil at the taste and execution of the would-be Brahams and Durusets. HAZLITT.

THE TALKING LADY.

BEN JONSON has a play called the The Silent Woman, who turns out, as might be expected, to be no woman to all-nothing, as Master Slender said, but "a great lubberly boy;" thereby, as I apprehend, discourteously presuming that a silent woman is a nonentity. If the learned dramatist, thus happily prepared, had happened to fall in with such a specimen of female loqua