and oft they have broken my shins.  I would not either object to sofas and ottomans, in any reasonable proportion; but protest I must, and in the strongest terms too, against such a multiplication and variety of easy chairs, as effectually exclude the possibility of easy sitting; and against the overweening increase of spider-tables, that interferes with rectilinear progression.  An harp mounted on a sounding-board, which is a stumbling-block to the feet of the short-sighted, is, I concede, an absolute necessity; and a piano-forte, like a coffin, should occupy the centre even of the smallest given drawing-room—­“the court awards it, and the law doth give it,”—­but why multiply footstools, till there is no taking a single step in safety?  An Indian cabinet also, or a buhl armoire, are, either, or both of them, very fit and becoming; but it cannot be right to make a broker’s shop of your best apartment.  An ink-stand, as large as a show twelfth-cake, is just and lawful; ditto, an ornamental escrutoire; and a necessaire for the work-table is, if there be meaning in language, perfectly necessary.  These, with an adequate contingent of musical snuff-boxes, or molu clocks, China figures, alabaster vases and flower-pots, together with a discreet superfluity of cut-paper nondescripts, albums, screens, toys, prints, caricatures, duodecimo classics, new novels and souvenirs, to cut a dash, and litter the tables, must be allowed to the taste and refinement of the times.  But surely some space should be left for depositing a coffee-cup, or laying down a useful volume, when the hand may require to be relieved from its weight, or when it is proper to take a pinch of snuff, or agreeable to wipe one’s forehead.  Josses, beakers, and Sevres’ vases have unquestionably the entree into a genteel apartment; but they are not entitled to a monopoly of the locale; nor are Roman antiquities, or statues even by Canova, justifiable in usurping the elbow-room of living men and women.  Most unfortunately for myself, I have a very small house, and a wife of the most enlarged taste; and the disproportion between these blessings is so great, that I cannot move without the risk of a heavy pecuniary loss by breakage, and a heavier personal affliction in perpetual imputations of awkwardness.  Then, again, it is no easy matter to put on a smiling and indifferent countenance, whenever a friend, accustomed to some latitude of motion, runs, as is often the case, his devastating chair against a high-priced work of art, or overturns a table laden with an “infinite thing” in costly bijouterie.  I have long made it a rule to exclude from my visiting-list, or at least not to let up stairs, ladies who pay their morning calls with a retinue of children:  but the thing is not always possible; and one urchin with his whip will destroy more in half an hour, than the worth of a month’s average domestic expenditure.  Oh! how I hate the little fidgeting, fingering, dislocating imps!  A bull in a china-shop is innocuous to the most orderly and amenable of them.  Why did Providence make children? and why does not some wise Draconic law banish them for ever to the nursery?