"But do you always take him out with you when you go a friendship-hunting?"

"Invariably. 'T is the sweetest, prettiest, best-conditioned animal. I call him my test-the touchstone by which to try a friend. No one can properly be said to love me, who does not love him."

"Excuse us, dear sir,-or madam, aforesaid,—if upon further consideration we are obliged to decline the otherwise invaluable offer of your friendship. We do not like dogs."

66

Mighty well, sir,-you know the conditions,—you may have worse offers. Come along, Test."

We

The above dialogue is not so imaginary, but that, in the intercourse of life, we have had frequent occasions of breaking off an agreeable intimacy by reason of these canine appendages. They do not always come in the shape of dogs; they sometimes wear the more plausible and human character of kinsfolk, near acquaintances, my friend's friend, his partner, his wife, or his children. could never yet form a friendship,-not to speak of more delicate correspondence, however much to our taste, without the intervention of some third anomaly, some impertinent clog affixed to the relation--the understood dog in the proverb. The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture,-like a schoolboy's holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it. What a delightful companion is, if he did not always bring his tall cousin with him! He seems to grow with him;

like some of those double births which we remember to have read of with such wonder and delight in the old "Athenian Oracle," where Swift commenced author by writing Pindaric odes (what a beginning for him!) upon Sir William Temple. There is the picture of the brother, with the little brother peeping out at his shoulder; a species of fraternity, which we have no name of kin close enough to comprehend. When comes, poking in

his head and shoulder into your room, as if to feel his entry, you think, surely you have now got him to yourself, what a three hours' chat we shall have!-but even in the haunch of him, and before his diffident body is well disclosed in your apartment, appears the haunting shadow of the cousin, overpeering his modest kinsman, and sure to overlay the expected good talk with his insufferable procerity of stature, and uncorresponding dwarfishness of observation. Misfortunes seldom come alone. 'Tis hard when a blessing comes accompanied. Cannot we like Sempronia, without sitting down to chess with her eternal brother? or know Sulpicia, without knowing all the round of her card-playing relations ?-must my friend's brethren of necessity be mine also? must we be hand and glove with Dick Selby the parson, or Jack Selby the calico-printer, because W. S., who is neither, but a ripe wit and a critic, has the misfortune to claim a common parentage with them? Let him lay down his brothers; and 't is odds but we will cast him in a pair of ours (we have a superflux) to balance the concession.

Let F. H. lay down his garrulous uncle; and Honorius dismiss his vapid wife, and superfluous establishment of six boys-things between boy and manhood—too ripe for play, too raw for conversation-that come in, impudently staring their father's old friend out of countenance; and will neither aid, nor let alone, the conference; that we may once more meet upon equal terms, as we were wont to do in the disengaged state of bachelorhood.

It is well if your friend, or mistress, be content with these canicular probations. Few young ladies but in this sense keep a dog. But when Rutilia hounds at you her tiger aunt; or Ruspina expects you to cherish and fondle her viper sister, whom she has preposterously taken into her bosom, to try stinging conclusions upon your constancy; they must not complain if the house be rather thin of suitors. Scylla must have broken off many excellent matches in her time, if she insisted upon all, that loved her, loving her dogs also.

An excellent story to this moral is told of Merry, of Della Cruscan memory. In tender youth he loved and courted a modest appanage to the Opera,-in truth a dancer, who had won him by the artless contrast between her manners and situation. She seemed to him a native violet, that had been transplanted by some rude accident into that exotic and artificial hotbed. Nor, in truth, was she less genuine and sincere than she appeared to him. He wooed and won this flower. Only for appearance sake, and for due honor to the bride's relations, she

craved that she might have the attendance of her friends and kindred at the approaching solemnity. The request was too amiable not to be conceded; and in this solicitude for conciliating the good-will of mere relations, he found a presage of her superior attentions to himself, when the golden shaft should have "killed the flock of all affections else." The morning came; and at the Star and Garter, Richmond,—the place appointed for the breakfasting,— accompanied with one English friend, he impatiently awaited what reinforcements the bride should bring to grace the ceremony. A rich muster she had made. They came in six coaches-the whole corps du balletFrench, Italian, men, and women. Monsieur de B., the famous pirouetter of the day, led his fair spouse, but craggy, from the banks of the Seine. The Prima Donna had sent her excuse. But the first and second Buffa were there; and Signor Sc-, and Signor Ch-, and Madame V, with a countless cavalcade besides of chorusers, figurantes! at the sight of whom Merry afterward declared, that "then for the first time it struck him seriously, that he was about to marry-a dancer." But there was no help for it. Besides, it was her day; these were, in fact, her friends and kinsfolk. The assemblage, though whimsical, was all very natural. But when the bride-handing out of the last coach a still more extraordinary figure than the rest-presented to him as her father-the gentleman that was to give her away—no less a person than Signor Delpini himself-with a sort of

pride, as much as to say, See what I have brought to do us honor!—the thought of so extraordinary a paternity quite overcame him; and slipping away under some pretence from the bride and her motley adherents, poor Merry took horse from the backyard to the nearest seacoast from which, shipping himself to America, he shortly after consoled himself with a more congenial match in the person of Miss Brunton; relieved from his intended clown-father, and a bevy of painted buffas for bridemaids.

XIV.

THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK.

AT what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his night gear, and prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not naturalists enough to determine. But for a mere human gentleman—that has no orchestra business to call him from his warm bed to such preposterous exercises-we take ten, or half after ten, (eleven, of course, during this Christmas solstice,) to be the very earliest hour at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think of it, we say; for to do it in earnest requires another half, hour's good consideration. Not but there are pretty sunrisings, as we are told, and such like gauds, abroad in the world, in summer-time especially, some hours before what we have assigned; which a gentleman may see, as they say, only for getting up. But having been tempted once or twice, in earlier