er self-confidence unbounded. She was a woman
of middle height, and masculine bearing. She was not prepossessing,
notwithstanding her white teeth and large mouth, and the intolerable
grin that a customer to the amount of a halfpenny and upwards could
bring upon her face under any circumstances, and at any hour of the day.
Her complexion might have been good originally. Red blotches scattered
over her cheek had destroyed its beauty. She wore a modest and becoming
cap, and a gold eyeglass round her neck. She was devoted to
money-making--heart and soul devoted to it during business hours. What
time she was not in the shop, she passed amongst dissenting ministers,
spiritual brethren, and deluded sinners. It remains to state the fact,
that, whilst a customer never approached the lady without being repelled
by the offensive smirk that she assumed, no dependent ever ventured near
her without the fear of the scowl that sat naturally (and fearfully,
when she pleased) upon her dark and inauspicious brow. What wonder that
little Jehu was crushed into nothingness, behind his own counter, under
the eye of his own wife!

* * * * *

THE WORLD OF LONDON. SECOND SERIES.

PART II.

In our last, we had occasion to speak sharply of that class of our
aristocratic youth known by the name of fast fellows, and it may be
thought that we characterized their foibles rather pointedly, and
tinctured our animadversions with somewhat of undue asperity. This
charge, however, can be made with no ground of reason or justice: the
fact is, we only lashed the follies for which that class of men are
pre-eminent, but left their vices in the shade, in the hope that the
_raw_ we have already established, will shame the fast fellows into a
sense of the proprieties of conduct due to themselves and their station.

The misfortune is, that these fast fellows forget, in the pursuit of
their favourite follies, that the mischief to society begins only with
themselves: that man is naturally a servile, imitative animal; and that
he follows in the track of a great name, as vulgar muttons run at the
heels of a belwether. The poison of fashionable folly runs comparatively
innocuous while it circulates in fashionable veins; but when vulgar
fellows are innoculated with the virus, it becomes a plague, a moral
small-pox, distorting, disfiguring the man's mind, pockpitting his small
modicum of brains, and blinding his mind's eye to th