These are some of the mortifications which I have encountered in the absurd attempt to visit at their houses.  To enumerate them all would be a vain endeavour:  I shall therefore just glance at the very common impropriety of which married ladies are guilty,—­of treating us as if we were their husbands, and vice versa.  I mean, when they use us with familiarity, and their husbands with ceremony. Testacea, for instance, kept me the other night two or three hours beyond my usual time of supping, while she was fretting because Mr. ——­ did not come home, till the oysters were all spoiled, rather than she would be guilty of the impoliteness of touching one in his absence.  This was reversing the point of good manners:  for ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is.  It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater.  Had Testacea kept the oysters back for me, and withstood her husband’s importunities to go to supper, she would have acted according to the strict rules of propriety.  I know no ceremony that ladies are bound to observe to their husbands, beyond the point of a modest behaviour and decorum:  therefore I must protest against the vicarious gluttony of Cerasia, who at her own table sent away a dish of Morellas, which I was applying to with great good will, to her husband at the other end of the table, and recommended a plate of less extraordinary gooseberries to my unwedded palate in their stead.  Neither can I excuse the wanton affront of ——.

But I am weary of stringing up all my married acquaintance by Roman denominations.  Let them amend and change their manners, or I promise to record the full-length English of their names, to the terror of all such desperate offenders in future.

ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS

The casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I picked up the other day—­I know not by what chance it was preserved so long—­tempts me to call to mind a few of the Players, who make the principal figure in it.  It presents the cast of parts in the Twelfth Night, at the old Drury-lane Theatre two-and-thirty years ago.  There is something very touching in these old remembrances.  They make us think how we once used to read a Play Bill—­not, as now peradventure, singling out a favorite performer, and casting a negligent eye over the rest; but spelling out every name, down to the very mutes and servants of the scene;—­when it was a matter of no small moment to us whether Whitfield, or Packer, took the part of Fabian; when Benson, and Burton, and Phillimore—­names of small account—­had an importance, beyond what we can be content to attribute now to the time’s best actors.—­“Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore.”—­What a full Shakspearian sound it carries! how fresh to memory arise the image, and the manner, of the gentle actor!