Reader, try it for once, only for one short twelvemonth.

It was not every week that a fashion of pink stockings came up; but mostly, instead of it, some rugged, untractable subject; some topic impossible to be contorted into the risible; some feature, upon which no smile could play; some flint, from which no process of ingenuity could procure a distillation.  There they lay; there your appointed tale of brick-making was set before you, which you must finish, with or without straw, as it happened.  The craving Dragon—­the Public—­like him in Bel’s temple—­must be fed; it expected its daily rations; and Daniel, and ourselves, to do us justice, did the best we could on this side bursting him.

MISS PATE
[Sidenote:  M.M.  Betham]

A Miss Pate (when he heard of her, he asked if she was any relation to Mr. John Head, of Ipswich) was at a party, and he said, on hearing her name, “Miss Pate I hate.”  “You are the first person who ever told me so, however,” said she.  “Oh!  I mean nothing by it.  If it had been Miss Dove, I should have said, Miss Dove I love, or Miss Pike I like.” ...  Another, who was very much marked with the small-pox, looked as if the devil had ridden roughshod over her face.  I saw him talking to her afterwards with great apparent interest, and noticed it, saying, “I thought he had not liked her.”  His reply was, “I like her internals very well.”

THE LOST ORNAMENT
[Sidenote:  Washington Allston]

Lamb was present when a naval officer was giving an account of an action which he had been in, and, to illustrate the carelessness and disregard of life at such times, said that a sailor had both his legs shot off, and as his shipmates were carrying him below, another shot came and took off his arms; they, thinking he was pretty much used up, though life was still in him, threw him out of a port.  “Shame, d——­d shame,” stuttered our Lamb, “he m-m-might have l-lived to have been an a-a-ornament to Society!”

YOUR HAT, SIR
[Sidenote:  Crabb Robinson]

I dined at Lamb’s, and then walked with him to Highgate, self-invited.  There we found a large party.  Mr. and Mrs. Green, the Aderses, Irving, Collins, R.A., a Mr. Taylor, a young man of talents in the Colonial Office, Basil Montagu, a Mr. Chance, and one or two others.  It was a rich evening.  Coleridge talked his best, and it appeared better because he and Irving supported the same doctrines.  His superiority was striking.  The idea dwelt on was the higher character of the internal evidence of Christianity, as addressed to our immediate consciousness of our own wants and the necessity of a religion and a revelation.  In a style not to me clear or intelligible, Irving and Coleridge both declaimed.  The advocatus diaboli for the evening was Mr. Taylor, who, in a way very creditable to his manners as a gentleman, but with little more than verbal cleverness, and an ordinary logic, and the confidence of a young man who has no suspicion of his own deficiencies, affirmed that those evidences which the Christian thinks he finds in his internal convictions, the Mahometan also thinks he has; and he affirmed that Mahomet had improved the condition of mankind.  Lamb asked him whether he came in a turban or a hat.