ut I keep you trifling too long on this asinine subject. I have already
passed the _Pons Asinorum_, and will desist, remembering the old
pedantic pun of Jem Boyer, my schoolmaster:--

"Ass _in praesenti_ seldom makes a WISE MAN _in futuro_."

* * * * *

Lamb not only had a passionate fondness for old books and old friends,
but he loved the old associations. He was no admirer of your modern
improvements. Unlike Dr. Johnson, he did not go into the "most stately
shops," but purchased his books and engravings at the stalls and from
second-hand dealers. In his eyes, the old Inner-Temple Church was a
handsomer and statelier structure than the finest Cathedral in England;
and to his ear, as well as to the ear of Will Honeycomb, the old
familiar cries of the peripatetic London merchants were more musical
than the songs of larks and nightingales. It grieved him sorely to see
an old building demolished which he had passed and repassed for years,
in his daily walks to and from his business,--or an old custom
abolished, whose observance he had witnessed when a child. "The
disappearance of the old clock from St. Dunstan's Church," says Mr.
Moxon, in his pleasant tribute to Lamb's memory in Leigh Hunt's Journal,
"drew tears from his eyes; nor could he ever pass without emotion the
place where Exeter Change once stood. The removal had spoiled a reality
in Gay. 'The passer-by,' he said, 'no longer saw the combs dangle in his
face.' This almost broke his heart." And he begins the following little
"essaykin" with a lamentation over the disappearance from the streets of
London of the tinman's old original sign, and a sigh for "the good old
modes of our ancestors."

What he says of maiden aunts and their pets is delightful, and
pleasantly reminds the reader of Addison's account of Sam Trusty's visit
to the Widow Feeble.

IN RE SQUIRRELS.

What is gone with the cages, with the climbing squirrel and bells to
them, which were formerly the indispensable appendage to the outside of
a tinman's shop, and were, in fact, the only live signs? One, we
believe, still hangs out on Holborn; but they are fast vanishing with
the good old modes of our ancestors. They seem to have been superseded
by that still more ingenious refinement of modern humanity, the
tread-mill, in which _human_ squirrels still perform a similar round of
ceaseless, improgressive clambering, which must be nuts to them.

We almost doubt t