careless an air, and, master of our feelings, submits himself so little to our judgment, that every thing seems superior. We discern not his course, we see no connexion of cause and effect; we are wrapt in ignorant admiration, and claim no kindred with his abilities. All the incidents, all the parts, look like chance, whilst we feel and are sensible that the whole is design. His characters not only act in strict conformity to nature, but in strict relation to us; just so much is shown as is requisite; just so much is impressed; he commands every passage to our heads and to our hearts, and moulds us as he pleases, and that with so much ease, that he never betrays his own exertions. We see these characters act from the mingled motives of passion, reason, interest, habit, and complexion, in all their proportions, when they are supposed to know it not themselves; and we are made to acknowledge that their actions and sentiments are, from these motives, the necessary result. He at once blends and distinguishes every thing; -every thing is complicated, every thing is plain. I restrain the further expressions of my admiration, lest they should not seem applicable to man ; but it is really astonishing that a mere human being, a part of humanity only, should so perfectly comprehend the whole; and that he should possess such exquisite art, that whilst every child shall feel the whole effect, his learned editors and commentators should yet so very frequently mistake or seem ignorant of the cause. A sceptre or a straw are in his hands of equal efficacy; he needs no selection; he converts every thing into excellence; nothing is too great, nothing is too base. Is a character efficient like Richard, it is every thing we can wish: is it otherwise, like Hamlet,

it is productive of equal admiration; action produces one mode of excellence and inaction another: the chronicle, the novel, or the ballad; the king or the beggar, the hero or the madman, the sot or the fool; it is all one;-nothing is worse, nothing is better. The same genius pervades and is equally admirable in all. Or, is a character to be shown in progressive change, and the events of years comprised within the hour,-with what a magic hand does he prepare and scatter his spells! The understanding must, in the first place, be subdued; and lo! how the rooted prejudices of the child spring up to confound the man! The weird sisters rise, and order is extinguished. The laws of nature give way, and leave nothing in our minds but wildness and horror. No pause is allowed us for reflection: horrid sentiment, furious guilt and compunction, air-drawn daggers, murders, ghosts, and enchantment shake and possess us wholly. In the mean time the process is completed. Macbeth changes under our eye, the milk of human kindness is converted into gall; he has supped full of horrors, and his May of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf; whilst we, the fools of amazement, are insensible to the shifting of place and the lapse of time, and till the curtain drops never once wake to the truth of things, or recognise the laws of existence. On such an occasion, a fellow like Rymer, waking from his trance, shall lift up his constable's staff, and charge this great magician, this daring practiser of arts prohibited, in the name of Aristotle to surrender; whilst Aristotle himself, disowning his wretched officer, would fall prostrate at his feet and acknowledge his supremacy.

MORRIS.

THE TALKING LADY.

BEN JONSON has a play called The Silent Woman, who turns out, as might be expected, to be no woman at all-nothing, as Master Slender said, but "a great lubberly boy;" thereby, as I apprehend, discourteously presuming that a silent woman is a non-entity. If the learned dramatist, thus happily prepared and predisposed, had happened to fall in with such a specimen of female loquacity as I have just parted with, he might perhaps have given us a pendant to his picture in the Talking Lady. Pity but he had! He would have done her justice, which I could not at any time, least of all now: I am too much stunned; too much like one escaped from a belfry on a coronation day. I am just resting from the fatigue of four days' hard listening; four snowy, sleety, rainy days-days of every variety of falling weather, all of them too bad to admit the possibility that any petticoated thing, were she as hardy as a Scotch fir, should stir out,-four days chained by "sad civility" to that fire-side, once so quiet, and again-cheering thought! again I trust to be so, when the echo of that visitor's incessant tongue shall have died

away.

The visitor in question is a very exellent and respectable elderly lady, upright in mind and body, with a figure that does honour to her dancing. master, a face exceedingly well preserved, wrinkled and freckled, but still fair, and an air of gentility over her whole person, which is not the least af fected by her out-of-fashion garb. She could never be taken for any thing but a woman of family, and perhaps she could as little pass for any other than

an old maid. She took us in her way from Lon don to the west of England: and being, as she wrote, "not quite well, not equal to much company, prayed that no other guest might be admitted, so that she might have the pleasure of our conversation all to herself," (Ours! as if it were possible for any of us to slide in a word edgewise!)

-"and especially enjoy the gratification of talking over old times with the master of the house, her countryman." Such was the promise of her letter, and to the letter it has been kept. All the news and scandal of a large county forty years ago, and a hundred years before, and ever since, all the marriages, deaths, births, elopements, law. suits, and casualties of her own times, her father's, grandfather's, great-grandfather's, nephew's, and grand-nephew's, has she detailed with a minuteness, an accuracy, a prodigality of learning, a profuseness of proper names, a pedantry of locality, which would excite the envy of a county historian, a king-at-arms, or even a Scotch novelist. Her knowledge is astonishing; but the most astonishing part of all is how she came by that knowledge. It should seem, to listen to her, as if, at some time of her life, she must have listened herself; and yet her countryman declares, that in the forty years he has known her, no such event has occurred; and she knows new news too! It must be intui tion.

The manner of her speech has little remarkable. It is rather old-fashioned and provincial, but perfectly lady-like, low and gentle, and not seeming so fast as it is; like the great pedestrians, she clears her ground easily, and never seems to use any exertion; yet "I would my horse had the speed of her tongue, and so good a continuer."

She will talk you sixteen hours a day for twenty days together, and not deduct one poor five minutes for halts and baiting time. Talking, sheer talking, is meat and drink and sleep to her. She likes nothing else. Eating is a sad interruption. For the tea-table she has some toleration; but dinner, with its clatter of plates and jingle of knives and forks, dinner is her abhorrence. Nor are the other common pursuits of life more in her favour. Walking exhausts the breath that might be better employed. Dancing is a noisy diversion, and singing is worse; she cannot endure any music, except the long, grand, dull concerto, which nobody thinks of listening to. Reading and chess she classes together as silent barbarisms, unworthy of a social and civilized people. Cards, too, have their faults; there is a rivalry, a mute eloquence in those four aces, that leads away the attention; besides, partners will sometimes scold; so she never plays at cards; and upon the strength of this abstinence had very nearly passed for serious, till it was discovered that she could not abide a long sermon. She always looks out for the shortest preacher, and never went to above one Bible meeting in her life.-" Such speeches!" quoth she, "I thought the men never meant to have done. People have great need of patience." Plays, of course, she abhors, and operas, and mobs, and all things that will be heard, especially children; though for babies, particularly when asleep, for dogs and pictures, and such silent intelligences as serve to talk of and talk to, she has a considerable partiality; and an agreeable and gracious flattery to the mammas and other owners of these pretty dumb things is a very usual introduction to her miscellaneous harangues. The matter of these