1st. Of Handsome Clothes.—­Here, I confess, I find myself in some difficulty.  The man who knows not how to have his name entered in the day-book of a tailor, is not one who could derive any benefit from instruction of mine.  He must be a born natural.  Why, it comes by instinct.

2nd. Of Comfortable Lodgings.—­Easily obtained and secured.  The easiest thing in life.  But the wit without money must possess very little more of the former than of the latter, if he do not, even when snugly ensconced in one splendid suite of apartments, have his eye upon many others; for landladies are sometimes vexatiously impertinent, and novelty is desirable.  Besides, his departure may be (nay, often is) extremely sudden.  When in quest of apartments, I have found tarnished cards in the windows preferable.  They imply a length of vacancy of the floor, and a consequent relaxation of those narrow, worldly (some call them prudent) scruples, which landladies are apt to nourish.  Hints of a regular income, payable four times a year, have their weight; nay, often convert weekly into quarterly lodgings.  Be sure there are no children in your house.  They are vociferous when you would enjoy domestic retirement, and inquisitive when you take the air.  Once (horresco referens!) on returning from my peripatetics, I was accosted with brutally open-mouthed clamour, by my landlady, who, dragging me in a state of bewilderment into her room, pointed to numerous specimens of granite, which her “young people” had, in their unhallowed thirst for knowledge, discovered and drawn from my trunk, which, by some strange mischance, had been left unlocked!  In vain I mumbled something touching my love of mineralogy, and that a lapidary had offered I knew not what for my collection.  I was compelled to “bundle,” as the idiomatic, but ignorant woman expressed herself.  To resume.

Let not the nervous or sensitive wit imagine that, in a vast metropolis like London, his chance of securing an appropriate lodging and a confiding landlady is at all doubtful.  He might lodge safe from the past, certain of the future, till the crash of doom.  I shall be met by Ferguson’s case.  Ferguson I knew well, and I respected him.  But he had a most unfortunate countenance.  It was a very solemn, but by no means a solvent face; and yet he had a manner with him too, and his language was choice, if not persuasive.  That the matter of his speech was plausible, none ever presumed to deny.  “It is all very well, Mr. Ferguson,”—­that was always conceded.  I do not wish to speak ill of the dead; but Ferguson never entered a lodging without being compelled to pay a fortnight in advance, and always

[Illustration:  EXPECTED TO BE OUT SHORTLY.]