kin close enough to comprehend.  When **** comes, poking in his head and shoulders 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, ever in the haunch of him, and before his diffident body is well disclosed in your apartment, appears the haunting shadow of the cousin, over-peering his modest kinsman, and sure to over-lay 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 ’tis 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 honour 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