so good for nothing? People are quite
right in judging a man's virtue by his wealth; for when a man has not a
shilling he soon grows a rogue. He must live on his wits, and a man's
wits have no conscience when his stomach is empty. We are all very poor
in Hell--very; if we were rich, Satan says, justly, that we should
become idle."

I know not how it is, but my frame is one peculiarly susceptible to
ennui. There's no man so instantaneously bored. What activity does this
singular constitution in all cases produce! All who are sensitive to
ennui do eight times the work of a sleek, contented man. Anything but a
large chair by the fireside, and a family circle! Oh! the bore of going
every day over the same exhausted subjects, to the same dull persons of
respectability; yet that is the doom of all domesticity. Then
_pleasure_! A wretched play--a hot opera, under the ghostly
fathership of Mr. Monck Mason--a dinner of sixteen, with such silence
or _such_ conversation!--a water-party to Richmond, to catch cold
and drink bad sauterne--a flirtation, which fills all your friends with
alarm, and your writing-desk with love-letters you don't like to burn,
and are afraid of being seen; nay, published, perhaps, one fine day,
that you may go by some d----d pet name ever afterwards!--hunting in a
thick mist--shooting in furze bushes, that "feelingly persuade you what
you are"--"the bowl," as the poets call the bottles of claret that never
warm you, but whose thin stream, like the immortal river,--

"Flows and as it flows, for ever may flow on;"

or the port that warms you indeed: yes, into a bilious headach and a low
fever. Yet all these things are pleasures!--parts of social enjoyment!
They fill out the corners of the grand world--they inspire the minor's
dreams--they pour crowds into St. James's, Doctors' Commons, and Melton
Mowbray--they----Oh! confound them all!--it bores one even to write
about them.

Only just returned to London, and, after so bright a panegyric on it,
I already weary of the variety of its samenesses. Shall I not risk the
fate of Faust, and fall in love--ponderously and _bona fide_? Or
shall I go among the shades of the deceased, and amuse myself with
chatting to Dido and Julius Caesar? Verily, reader, I leave you for the
present to guess my determination.

* * * * *

DOMESTIC HINTS.

* * * * *

WASTE OF BONES

Is at all times