orations is inconceivably various. Perhaps the local and genealogical anecdotes, the sort of supplement to the history of shire, may be her strongest point; but she shines almost as much in medicine and housewifery. Her medical dissertations savour a little of that particular branch of the science called quackery. She has a specific against almost every disease to which the human frame is liable; and is terribly prosy and unmerciful in her symptoms. Her cures kill. In housekeeping, her notions resemble those of other verbal managers; full of economy and retrenchment, with a leaning towards reform, though she loves so well to declaim on the abuses in the cook's department, that I am not sure that she would very heartily thank any radical who should sweep them quite away. For the rest, her system sounds very finely in theory, but rather fails in practice. Her recipes would be capital, only that some way or other they do not eat well; her preserves seldom keep; and her sweet wines are sure to turn sour. These are certainly her favourite topics; but any one will do. Allude to some anecdote of the neighbourhood, and she forthwith treats you with as many parallel passages as are to be found in an air with variations. Take up a new publication, and she is equally at home there; for though she knows little of books, she has, in the course of an up-and-down life, met with a good many authors, and teazes and provokes you by telling of them precisely what you do not care to hear, the maiden names of their wives, and the christian names of their daughters, and into what families their sisters and cousins married, and in what towns they have lived, what streets, and what numbers. Boswell himself never drew up the table of Dr. Johnson's

Fleet-street courts with greater care, than she made out to me the successive residences of P. P. Esq. author of a tract on the French Revolution, and a pamphlet on the Poor Laws. The very weather is not a safe subject. Her memory is a perpetual register of hard frosts, and long droughts, and high winds, and terrible storms, with all the evils that followed in their train, and all the personal events connected with them, so that if you happen to remark that clouds are come up, and you fear it may rain, she replies, "Ay, it is just such a morning as three-and-thirty years ago, when my poor cousin was married-you remember my cousin Barbara-she married so and so, the son of so and so;" and then comes the whole pedigree of the bridegroom; the amount of the settlements, and the reading and signing them over night; a description of the wedding-dresses, in the style of Sir Charles Grandison, and how much the bride's gown cost per yard; the names, residences, and a short subsequent history of the bridemaids and men, the gentleman who gave the bride away, and the clergyman who performed the ceremony, with a learned antiquarian digression relative to the church; then the setting out in procession; the marriage; the kissing; the crying; the breakfasting; the drawing the cake through the ring; and finally, the bridal excursion, which brings us back again at an hour's end to the starting-post, the weather, and the whole story of the sopping, the drying, the clothes-spoiling, the cold-catching, and all the small evils of a summer shower. By this time it rains, and she sits down to a pathetic see-saw of conjectures on the chance of Mrs. Smith's having set out for her daily walk, or the possibility that Dr. Brown may

have ventured to visit his patients in his gig, and the certainty that Lady Green's new housemaid would come from London on the outside of the coach.

With all this intolerable prosing, she is actually reckoned a pleasant woman! Her acquaintance in the great manufacturing town where she usually resides is very large, which may partly account for the misnomer. Her conversation is of a sort to bear dividing. Besides, there is, in all large societies, an instinctive sympathy which directs each individual to the companion most congenial to his humour. Doubtless, her associates deserve the old French compliment," Ils ont tous un grand talent pour le silence." Parcelled out amongst some seventy or eighty, there may even be some savour in her talk. It is the tete-à-tete that kills, or the small fire-side circle of three or four, where only one can speak, and all the rest must seem to listen-seem! did I say?-must listen in good earnest. Hotspur's expedient in a similar situation of crying "Hem! Go to," and marking not a word, will not do here; compared to her, Owen Glendower was no conjuror. She has the eye of a hawk, and detects a wandering glance, an incipient yawn, the slightest movement of impatience. The very needle must be quiet. If a pair of scissors do but wag, she is affronted, draws herself up, breaks off in the middle of a story, of a sentence, of a word, and the unlucky culprit must, for civility's sake, summon a more than Spartan fortitude, and beg the torturer to resume her torments-"That, that is the unkindest cut of all!" I wonder, if she had happened to have married, how many husbands she would have talked to death. It is certain that none of her relations are

longlived after she comes to reside with them. Father, mother, uncle, sister, brother, two nephews, and one niece, all these have successively passed away, though a healthy race, and with no visible disorder-except- -but we must not be uncharitable. They might have died, though she had been born dumb:-"It is an accident that happens every day." Since the disease of her last nephew, she attempted to form an establishment with a widow lady, for the sake, as they both said, of the comfort of society. But-strange miscalculation! she was a talker too! They parted in a week.

And we have also parted. I am just returning from escorting her to the coach, which is to convey her two hundred miles westward; and I have still the murmur of her adieux resounding in my ears, like the indistinct hum of the air on a frosty night. It was curious to see how, almost simultaneously, these mournful adieux shaded into cheerful salutations of her new comrades, the passengers in the mail. Poor souls! Little does the civil young lad who made way for her, or the fat lady, his mamma, who with pains and inconvenience made room for her, or the grumpy gentleman in the opposite corner, who, after some dispute, was at length won to admit her dressing-box,- -little do they suspect what is to befall them. Two hundred miles and she never sleeps in a carriage! Well, patience be with them, and comfort and peace! A pleasant journey to them! And to her all happiness! She is a most kind and excellent person, one for whom I would do any thing in my poor power-ay, even were it to listen to her another four days. MISS MITFORD.

MODERN ROME.

AMONG the odd traits observable in the Roman population, is their aversion to two luxuries, especially esteemed in more northern countries, and though somewhat matters of taste, not altogether unallied to a higher sentiment; these are flowers and fire. The latter, during winter, is as truly physically requisite as in colder climates; but less surprise should be excited by this antipathy among a people whose idea of comfort is so widely different from our own, and to whom this cheerful influence brings with it none of the domestic associations which endear it to the denizens of bleaker localities, and the possessors of a better founded enthusiasm. The former distaste is more remarkable, when we consider the proverbial predilections of the Italians for the beautiful; and yet it is to a surprising extent true, that most are indifferent and many decidedly averse to flowers; whereas, in Florence, we were ever beset with flower-girls, and the Neapolitan peasants are seldom seen without a nosegay. I have heard this peculiarity of the Romans ascribed to their very delicate sense of smell, which renders even a mild perfume quite overpowering; but it is difficult to admit a reason which is so inconsistent with their habitual toleration of far less genial odours, particularly the unwholesome exhalations from the buried aqueducts and infected campagna.

Although the period of my sojourn was considered, in some respects, an uncommon season, yet the excellence of the climate of Rome, according to my best information and experience, has been sadly exaggerated. During winter, a south