Pharisees of all sorts, and try if ye can still open your hearts and your doors, like the good Samaritan. This man was himself, too, brought up in a splendid mansion, and might have revelled and rioted in all worldly goods. Yet this was one of the most ordinary of his actions.

Dear N., I know I cannot delight you more than by repeating the praises of another friend: - so richly in this respect has heaven compensated me, for a thousand evils, in things of which even death cannot deprive me.

P. S. Among other suburban dwellers about London, I have omitted to mention in the course of this article, that Sir Thomas More lived at Chelsea; that Thomas Moore hummed a short time at Hornsey; and that Coleridge resides at Highgate, a "stroller with a book." 1823.

DR. JOHNSON, THE DEVIL, AND MR.

"TH

COBBETT.

HE office of the Register, and my shop, are now at No. II Bolt Court, Fleet Street. It is curious that I am now in the very house in which Old Dread-Devil, Dr. Johnson, lived and wrote so many years! I have been a long while wanting to get it, on account of the cleanness, neatness, and stillness of the court, and the nearness of the house to the printing-office; but until three days ago, I was not at all aware, that the melancholy moralist ever lived in it.

The

There is a neat coffee-house in the court, called Dr. Johnson;' and though I cannot forgive the doctor for having given, in his own person, an example to illustrate the definition in his dictionary, where, against the word Pensioner,' he puts a slave of state; though I cannot forgive him for this, to see, as I do, from my window, his name put over a coffeeroom, with a view to attract custom to it, is very pleasing his name, thus used, is a mark of respect for his great mental endowments and vast literary labors, while his statue in St. Paul's is only a memorial of his having been a slave of state." — Cobbett's Register.

We like these self-references of Mr. Cobbett, when his humanities are upon him, and he has a good word to say for another. A piece of sympathy, from him, is the more pleasant, inasmuch as he seems to think it to be his duty to be full of antipathies ("a good hater," as Johnson called it), and to push them to the utmost. We think he might relent a little during this fine, promising weather in the political world, and give us a few more of his "primroses" and pleasant anecdotes.

Dr. Johnson was one of the last of our great men, who had reason, throughout life, to curse the superstition inflicted upon him in childhood. His mother, poor woman, when he was just able to learn what she meant, was so eager to impress upon him the doctrine of eternal punishment, that she not only made him get out of his bed on purpose to infix it the more on his recollection, but called up the servants to aid the calamity. Mr. Cobbett, therefore, has too much. reason to call him " Dread-Devil ; " but our politician,

in proceeding to say something to his advantage, might have added another good word for the "melancholy moralist," since it was into his house, in this very Bolt Court, if we mistake not, that the doctor, who was a kind-hearted man, notwithstanding the asperities of his temperament, acted the very unusual Christian part, like a proper Samaritan, of bringing a poor girl on his shoulders, whom he found destitute in the streets, putting her into his own bed, making her well, and sending her home to her relations.

In Bolt Court, Johnson wrote the Lives of the Poets. He lived there from the year 1776 till he died. He had a garden to the house (Mr. Cobbett, who is horticultural, should revive it), with stone seats at the door. Boswell describes a conversation he had with him one day, when each took a seat in the open air, and the doctor was "in a placid frame of mind, and talked away easily."

1830.

S

COFFEE-HOUSES AND SMOKING.

MOKING has had its vicissitudes, as well as other fashions. In Elizabeth's day, when it first came up, it was a high accomplishment: James (who liked it none the better for its being of Raleigh's invention) indignantly refused it the light of his countenance in Charles's time it was dashed out by the cannon; lips had no leisure for it under Charles the

Second: the clubs and the Dutch brought it back again with King William: it prevailed more or less during the reign of the first two Georges; grew thin, and died away under George the Third; and has lately reappeared, with a flourish of Turkish pipes, and through the milder medium of the cigar, under the auspices of his successor.

The last smoker I recollect among those of the old school, was a clergyman. He had seen the best society, and was a man of the most polished behavior. This did not hinder him from taking his pipe every evening before he went to bed. He sat in his armchair, his back gently bending, his knees a little apart, his eyes placidly inclined towards the fire: and delighted, in the intervals of puff, to recount anecdotes of the Marquis of Rockingham and "my Lord North." The end of his recreation was announced to those who had gone to bed, by the tapping of the bowl of his pipe upon the hob, for the purpose of emptying it of its ashes.* Ashes to ashes; head to bed. It is a pity that the long day of life cannot always terminate as pleasantly. Bacon said that the art of making death-beds easy was among the desiderata of knowledge. Perhaps, for the most part, they are easier than the great chancellor imagined; but,

*This lover of "the great plant" was Leigh Hunt's father, who, as a smoker, is thus described in The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt: "He was one of the gentry who retained the old fashion of smoking. He indulged in it every night before he went to bed, which he did at an early hour; and it was pleasant to see him sit, in his tranquil and gentlemanly manner, and relate anecdotes of 'my Lord North,' and the Rockingham administration, interspersed with those mild puffs and urbane resumptions of the pipe." — ED.

no doubt, the most conscientious ones might often be bettered. A virtuous man shall not always take his departure as comfortably as a sinner with a livelier state of diaphragm. Frenchmen have died, sitting in their chairs, full-dressed and powdered. I have a better taste in mortality than that; but I think I could drop off with a decent compromise between thought and forgetfulness, sitting with my pipe by a fireside, in an old elbow-chair.

I delight to think of the times when smoking was an ornament of literature, a refreshment and repose to the studious head; when Hobbes meditated, and Cowley built his castles in those warmer clouds, and Dr. Aldrich his quadrangles. In smoking, you may think or not think, as you please. If the mind is actively employed, the pipe keeps it in a state of satisfaction, supplies it with a side luxury, a soft ground to work upon. If you wish to be idle, the successive puffs take the place of thinking. There is a negative activity in it, that fills up the place of real. Intruding notions are met with a puff in their teeth, and puffed into nothing. Studious men are subject to a working and fermenting of thought, when their meditations would fain be over: they cannot always cease meditating. Bacon was accustomed to take a draught of March beer towards bedtime, to settle this æstuary of his mind. I wonder he did not take a pipe, as a gentler carrier off of that uneasiness. Being a link between thought and no thought, one would imagine it would have been a more advisable compromise with his state of excitement than the dashing of one stream upon another in that violent manner, and forcing his nerves