sible. I calculate, in course, Mrs.'Allen Barnaby, that your plan in writing upon the Union, is to travel through all the most celebrated and wonderful parts of it?"

"Most assuredly," replied the authoress, with decision.

"Well then, my plan is to travel too," returned Mrs. Beauchamp; "because then, you know, as the things come in all their glory before our eyes, I can explain them to you, and make you realize their particular excellence at the first blush, as I may say. What do you say to that plan, Mrs. Allen Barnaby?"

"That it is the most admirable, the most perfect, the most inconceivably kind that could possibly have entered your head, and that so inspired, I must be dull indeed if I fail. But what does the colonel and your beautiful daughter say to it, my dear Mrs. Beauchamp?"

"Oh! Annie is delighted. She has long been dying for a travelling frolic; and she undertakes to do the honours to your friends, which will leave us to our studies, you know. As to the colonel, to say the truth, I have not yet mentioned the subject to him; but he is, I do expect, the very best good man alive, and I am sure he will make no objection, provided the major can smoke a cigar, and play a game of piquet. Can he, Mrs. Allen Barnaby?"

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"The major is very fond of smoking," replied our heroine; "and I rather think too," she added gently, "that he now and then likes a game at piquet.'

"Well then, I will answer for all the rest," resumed the energetic Mrs. Beauchamp, her patriotic ardour animating her even to her fingers' ends, which were already itching, as she said, to be at her packing. "The colonel will be back in a few minutes to take his morning iced julap, and then I will tell him all about it."

Mrs. Beauchamp was by no means " talking without her host," when she said that if the major smoked cigars, and played piquet, she could answer for all the rest. Of course she was too clever a woman not to know how to set the thing properly before the eyes of her husband. She said little or nothing to him concerning her project of redeeming the reputation of the United States, and undoing all the mischief which former travellers had perpetrated against this rudely-treated portion of the earth's surface, by taking the pen of Mrs. Allen Barnaby under her especial influence and control. She said little or nothing of all this, because she knew that, although her husband was, as a matter of course, an excellent patriot (what American is not?) yet nevertheless, the sluggish circulation of his blood, which, without greatly injuring his bodily health, had reduced his mental energies very nearly to the condition of those of a dormouse, prevented his greatly enjoying any long discussions on the subject. What she chiefly dwelt upon, therefore, was the great delight which his darling Annie would enjoy from travelling in the society of this very distinguished English party, and also the providential circumstance of their meeting with a gentleman who could both smoke cigars and play piquet, and thus render the performance of his long-given promise of taking his daughter "about a little," a matter of pleasure instead of annoyance.

"Very well, my dear," was the colonel's first answer: "manage it just as you like. If it's a good boat I shall be quite ready to start."

PROFESSIONAL IDIOSYNCRASY.

The influence of particular pursuits upon the moral and intellectual constitution of man would form a worthy and abounding subject for a philosophical treatise.

PORCELAIN TOWER.

To be sure it would; and if the nation gets nothing else by the war with the teapots, the promulgation of such a connexion is well worth the cost. Like all other great truths, however, it has had its foreshadowings; and the writer from whom we quote, must be contented with sharing the honours of discovery. Archbishop Whately, for instance, has lately published a very curious illustration of the text, in his lecture to the lawyers on the influence of their special branch of industry; and Quevedo must have had the same truth in his "mind's eye, Horatio," when he divided the lower regions into departments, where mankind are punished, as they have sinned, in categories. It is to be noted also that an obscure notion of professional influences has of late been working in the heads of some new-fangled political reformers, who have proposed pulling down half London, and utterly demolishing Manchester, Leeds, and half-a-dozen other manufacturing towns, and turning all the steam-engines and spinning-jennies thereof into ploughshares. Indeed the advocates for this improvement have not scrupled to declare their conviction that such a measure would directly benefit the morals of the people; which can only arise through some mysterious connexion, on the one hand, between the weaving of plots and of calicoes-between Sheffield plate and Birmingham politics; and, on the other, between rural simplicity and passive obedience,— between thin populations and thick skulls. That such connexions do subsist may be reduced to a statistical demonstration, by tabular views of the House of Commons, showing that the majority of radicals are returned by the manufacturing interests, while the counties supply the most numerous and the best samples of high-pressure authoritatives. As all undue interference with elections is decidedly impossible, the inference is irresistible.

That professional influences do tell, not only in forming the moral and intellectual complex of the individual, but in determining his bodily constitution, and countless particulars of habit, gesture, and outward seeming, is rendered probable in a thousand other instances. To assert the affirmative is no more, than to assert the undeniable fact that different trades and professions require different qualifications. What a man does every day must become a second nature to him; and what he thinks every day, must grow into an immovable prejudice. Thus the smith by a constant employment of the hammer, acquires an unusual muscularity of arm; and the man thus gifted must possess an uncommon share of habitual good-temper, if a knowledge of the fact does not operate instinctively to render him a striking character. So, too, the Irish chairmen are remarkable for the well-developed calves of their legs, and for an accompanying tendency to gallantry; though we cannot exactly explain the physiological cause and effect which couples these properties.

There are two trades by which the outward man is so decidedly modi

fied as to admit not the possibility of mistake. A tailor or a postboy you might pick out of ten thousand. How it happens that the one addicts himself principally to gin, and the other to ale, it is not difficult to understand; but to estimate all the consequences of this predisposition upon the moral and intellectual peculiarities of the respective parties, would take up more time than we can at present conveniently dispose of. No one, however, will refuse to admit that to the sedentary habits of the tailor that practitioner owes his superiority as a philosopher; while the incessant "tolutations and succussations" of the postboy must tend to induce a like jumble of the brains, fatally hostile to long trains of consecutive thought. To this latter circumstance we are disposed to refer the postboy's want of power to co-ordinate the ideas of labour and reward;— a deficiency that disposes him to haggle for a larger gratuity, however liberal, than the sum first tendered to him. For the same reason, a hackney-coachman is an un-fare man in his dealings with his customers; and especially when he is employed by females, tries unfairly to get more than the fare out of the fair.

But of all professional influences those which are wrought upon the sailor are the most wonderful. The landsman has not completed his first voyage, before he is subjected to an entire metamorphosis. Nothing of him "but doth suffer a sea change." Of some of these influences the causation is sufficiently evident, while others become intelligible only through the process of a more recondite speculation. The sailor's loose knee and slouching gait have an immediate connexion with the rolling of the vessel, as the looseness of his trousers and absence of suspenders are decidedly corollaries from the owner's climbing necessities; but what may be the subtile link of causation which connects a seafaring life with a pigtail, it would puzzle Kant himself to determine. A seaman's pigtail is, indeed, a transcendental phenomenon, and every hair of it a perfect mystery.

For a long series of years (nay, perhaps of centuries) the apothecary was accustomed to show strong marks of his profession both in his outward man, and his inward idiosyncrasy. The Dalmahoy wig and the confection-coloured dittoes of our father's age, have indeed disappeared; and even black silk stockings, with shorts to correspond, are waxing rare. Whether this be attributable to the general march of civilization, which is fast obliterating many other eccentric peculiarities, and bringing all mankind nearer to the average man of the dealers in statistics, or whether it be the result of a false ambition in the parties to be confounded with their superiors, it is not for us to state. However this may be, the fact itself is undeniable; and an apothecary must be an apothecary of very little soul indeed, who does not eschew every thing distinctive in his exterior, to the full extent of his capability. With respect to "that within which passes show," the escape is not so easy to accomplish, as the deapothecarizing of the exterior. Quo semel est imbuta is true of this personage to an excess; and once an apothecary always an apothecary, is a maxim as universally predicable, as it is in the more frequently cited case of the sempiternal captain.

In estimating professional influences, however, a greater power of discrimination is necessary than falls to every man's share. Shakspeare,

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speaking in the person of Falstaff, says, "would I were a weaver, for then I might sing all manner of songs, "in allusion to that artist's love of psalmody; whereas the best judges of modern times have assigned this excellence to the sons of St. Crispin; so that “a psalm-singing cobbler" is the proverbial expression for a low sectarian. Can both these positions be true? and if so, what is the fine and imperceptible thread that connects the awl and the shuttle in this striking particular ?

No

The moral and intellectual phasis of the barber has been so admirably hit off by our predecessors, that little is left to say about it. There is, indeed, one trait, a pert familiarity, about these practitioners, which is a second nature in them, and which is best explained by the habit they have acquired of taking their customers by the nose. one (says the French proverb) is a hero to his valet-de-chambre; what then must he be in the eyes of his barber? Never is the soul of man so subdued, as when the body is placed at the disposition of that trimming minister.

"You cut me," said a gentleman to his operator, without otherwise being discomposed by the accident, and continuing his conversation with a bystander. A second time he exclaimed, "You cut me!" and a third and a fourth, in a like state of mental prostration. His friend, however, who was not under the depressing influence, could bear it no longer, and starting into a towering passion, he cried out in his sharpest key, ، if he bears it I can't : by G- sir, if you cut him again, I'll knock you down!"

So, also, on another occasion, when the operator, in order to give the necessary rotundity of contour to the cheek of a very thin man, had inserted his finger in the patient's mouth, he, by an ill-calculated movement, sent the razor clean through the integuments, and made a gash in his own digit. This "untoward event" produced from him not a token of regret, not a confounding of himself in apologies, but an indignant "d-n your lantern jaws, I have cut myself to the bone!" So dangerous is it to trust another man with your olfactory.

The easy impudence of the barber is the more remarkable, inasmuch as it was not shared by the congeneric hairdresser (when hairdressers were). There was a suaviter in modo about these knights of the curling-iron, a mincing gait, and a lackadaisical tone of voice quite unique.

Negat quis? nego; ait? aio: postremo imperavi egomet mihi
Omnia assentari,

might have been written for their sake. How could Franklin have thought of making such men soldiers? In all else the barber and the hairdresser were as one, and often, indeed, were united in the same person. Whence then the difference? Simply from this, that the barber instinctively felt his advantage; and that his entire morale bent under the impulse to realize its full benefit.

Another character of sufficiently salient peculiarity, is the linendraper's and haberdasher's "young gentleman," or, in the vernacular, his shop-boy. Where will you find an Adonis whose dress is more perfect-whose hair is more glossy, or more accurately parted down one

side with a raie de chair-whose black satin cravat is more artistement noué, or whose pins are inserted with a more bewitching grace-whose coat is a more accurate fit, and whose waistcoat is more nicely chosen?— nowhere. His manners too are formed to match; obsequious and elegant to an excess of refinement, with the carriage customer, leeringly insidious and insinuating with the grisette, and brutally insolent to those whom he considers as nobodies. In all these things we may fancy the closest possible approach to the fashionable dandy; yet nothing in reality is more widely separated; in so much that there is not a surer mark of the beast, not a more certain symptom of a complete break-down in an aspirant to fashionable notoriety, than to approach the endimanché je ne scais quoi, of these juvenile retailers. The French have the merit of first seizing on this particular of professional shading, and of imbodying it in the imaginary person of Monsieur It is right, however, to note how far the professional influence is, in the Frenchman, modified by others which are national. The love of war which is the characteristic of the French people, comes out in the Messieurs Calico, in an affectation of the spur and of the moustache, which was imported into England in a mere servile spirit of imitation. It would not, therefore, do. The ass in the lion's skin was not more readily discovered by its bray, than an English haberdasher, bewhiskered and befrogged, is by an unvanquishable shoppishness, that sticks to him like a leech. Never was an English shopman taken for a general, not even for a drum-major.

There is in the retail vender, no matter of what, a something, intimately affecting his morale alike and his physique, and showing that the keeping a shop reacts on the shopkeeper in a way very different from the inhabitation of a counting-house or an office. To take only a single trait. Your shopkeeper is exemplary in the practice of patience. A lady, for instance, shall go into Swan and Edgar's and ask to see every article they deal in, from a satin gown to a garter, from lace at twenty guineas to a sixpenny paper of pins,-she shall toss over and tumble their richest silks, try on their ready-made cloaks, and give the wretch in attendance the trouble of rolling and unrolling twenty different shades of the same coloured calico lining, or twenty widths of a ribbon, and having thus occupied a pleasant hour, coolly rise from her seat, with a matter of course "doesn't suit" and take her departure without expending a single penny. Now if hope deferred maketh the heart sick, and, if balking a legitimate expectation is an outrage upon common feeling, ought not the man so tried to rebel against the intruder, and treat her with a very plain exposition of the morality of the case? No such thing; the victim smiles, bows, follows his persecutor through the rain to her carriage, and humbly hopes that "he shall be more fortunate on another day." Talk of patience, indeed! Job was petulant in comparison with this man, and patient Grizzle a shrew and a vixen to him.

Another striking peculiarity of the shopkeeper is his credulity. The police-officers seem to have little else to do than to vindicate the laws in his behalf, and to put bounds on the barefaced impudence of all sorts of impostors, who make the shopkeeper their special prey. There is no pretence so shallow, on which the retail tradesman is unwilling to part with his goods; and the same tricks