remains to be said for my Salvator Rosa, which
is my own joy and pride?

While Mrs. Bliss renders me anything but
blissful, the daughters of Bliss, paying the
warmest court to my wife, make my poor dear
Agnes blush crimson, as if some deep irony
were at the bottom of such exclamations as,
"Oh, what a sweet dress! Where did you get
it? Who is your dressmaker? Oh, what an
exquisite brooch! Do let me see it nearer!"
When the robe is gingham, and the brooch a
common shell-cameo; and the Bliss girls
themselves "walk" (or sit) "in silk attire," and wear
no end of Hunt and Roskell! But I am sure
they never mean to quiz, and that they are justly
popular.

Perhaps, as the last ecstasies of the Bliss
ladies are fading through the door, the same
door admits the low growl of Mr. Nill, who
walks in at the head of his family. Mr. Nill is
a tall thin adust ferrety-looking man, with a
ferrety nose, and ferrety eyes of a pale red
round the rims. The ferrety nose and the ferrety
eyes poke and pry into everything; but the
latter organs possess the faculty which Walter
Scott attributes to the mad maiden in the Lady
of the Lake; they "seem all to mark, yet
naught to spy;" for in their most restless action
(and their action is restless) they preserve a
blankness which denotes that not an object is to
them worth the trouble of speculation. The Nills
are silent people. There are some who talk you
dead: there are some who kill you by silence.
Of the two, I almost think I prefer—always
excepting when Mr. Bark Nosybore calls on me—
the incontinent of speech to the retentive. When
a man has built a new library, or a new pigsty,
when he has planted a fir-tree, or planted a flag-
staff, he wants a flowing libation of sympathy
upon his work. Harmless wish! Who, in this
thorny world, would not lend that wish a helping
hand? Mr. Nill would not: Mrs. Nill would
not: Mr. Nill, junior, and the two Miss Nills
would not. Marvellous unity! It is not,
indeed, wonderful that the offspring should
resemble either parent; but that Mrs. Nill the
red and thin, should be like Mr. Nill the pale
and stout, is a matrimonial miracle, winch I
suppose to be wrought by elective affinity, and years
of companionship.

To the above two classes of humanity who
respectively admire all, and nothing, and whom
we may call the overloaders and the
underloaders of the great social balance, may be added
the comparers, who never praise an object without
being reminded of something else they have
seen. Mrs. Secundum goes into transports at
your pond: but she has seen the Lake of
Geneva. "Ah, that was sublime!" Before the little
picturesque cascade in your grounds, Miss Secundum
pauses—first in silent—then in speaking
ecstasy. "Beautiful, beautiful! Most poetic!
It reminds me of that fall near dear Keswick,
the cataract of Lodore, about which Southey
wrote so grandly. 'How does the water come
down at Lodore.'" The Twisters, who
sometimes come to see us, are also comparers, but
they improve upon the Secundums, by setting up,
beside every object they admire, an object utterly
and wildly different. They would scorn to
compare a molehill to a mountain, rather would
they boldly compare a mountain to a saucepan.
Your carpet, which is "Charming! charming,"
makes them cry out, "Have you seen the
picture-gallery of the Louvre?" You ask Miss
Twister if she is not delighted with Tennyson's
Idylls of the King. To which she replies,
"Lovely! But have you heard Gounod's
Faust?"

Next in my list come the Blunderers, who
possibly do not mean to hurt your feelings, any
more than pigs in a garden mean to hurt your
flowers. Yet, somehow or other, they do it.
Though not spiteful, they are scarcely kind
hearted; nay, if tact, that rare quality, be but
the blossom of kindly feeling, they are surely
not kind hearted. Self-occupied, and doing all
for self-glorification, they have no eyes for others.
Such is Jack Fulltop, who, by an instinct one
might almost call dexterity, stumbles upon the
sore places of everybody's soul. Yet he takes
a coarse interest in you—claps you on the back,
and humiliates you in a friendly manner. To
the author of a still-born poem he will say,
"What a pity, my dear friend, that the world
has taken no notice of your book!" To a man
who is getting to the shady side of sixty, he will
set forth the blessings of old age, and recommend
Cicero de Senectute. Jack's presence in
a friendly party spoils that friendly party. By
dint of his free and easy boisterousness, he
produces a constraint in others; and by force of
frantic distortion, puts everybody else into an
unnatural posture. Save me from that man at
a dinner-party! I might be his butt—for he
always has a butt. And out of sheer affection
(when he is in a good temper) he never takes
his eyes, nor his voice, from the poor butt, but
patronises him to that frightful extent, all
through dinner, that it would have been a more
delicate attention to have garrotted him from
behind, with the dinner-napkin, when he took
his seat.

Yet, was I better off the other evening at the
solemn eating given by Lord Mastic, when I
was indigestibly closed in between Lady Fleedle
and Professor Toady? Lady Fleedle, who wants
to be polite to everybody, but blunderingly
affronts everybody, because she is blind and
deaf; Professor Toady, who sets off his flunkeyism
to the Great, by offensive rudeness to the
Little. If Toady is a warning, Lady Fleedle is
an awful revelation. In her mistakes, the whole
hollow mechanism of the world, with the plaster
worn off, is revealed. The dial-plate of her
society-watch is gone, and the hands go their
distracted rounds over wild wheels and broken
springs. With Professor Toady I had been
talking of spirit rapping, and I had vented
the very original remark that "Some people
thought it was the work of the devil!" on which
Lady Fleedle called out, "Ah, dear man, I knew
him intimately! Is he dead? What a loss to
the world!" On the other side of Lady Fleedle,