puzzled them. Mr. Shelley, in coming to our house that night, had found a woman lying near the top of the hill in fits. It was a fierce winter night, with snow upon the ground; and winter loses nothing of its fierceness at Hampstead. My friend, always the promptest as well as the most pitying on these occasions, knocked at the first houses he could reach, in order to have the woman taken in. The invariable answer was that they could not do it. He asked for an outhouse to put her in while he went for a doctor. Impossible. In vain he assured them she was no impostor, an assurance he was well able to give, having studied something of medicine, and even walked the hospitals, that he might be useful in this way. They would not dispute the point with him; but doors were closed, and windows were shut down. Had he lit upon worthy Mr. Park, the philologist, he would assuredly have come, in spite of his Calvinism. But he lived too far off. Had he fit upon you, dear B-n, or your neighbor, D-e, you would, either of you, have jumped up from amidst your books or your bed-clothes, and have gone out with him. But the paucity of Christians is astonishing, considering the number of them. Time flies; the poor woman is in convulsions; her son, a young man, lamenting over her. At last my friend sees a carriage driving up to a house at a little distance. The knock is given; the warm door opens; servants and lights pour forth. Now, thought he, is the time. He puts on his best address, which anybody might recognize for that of the highest gentleman as well as an interesting individual, and plants himself in the way of if "No an elderly person who is stepping out of the carriage with his family. He tells his story. They only press on the faster. "Will you go and see her?” sir, there is no necessity for that sort of thing, depend on it: - impostors swarm everywhere: - the thing cannot be done: :- sir, your conduct is extraordinary." "Sir," cried Mr. Shelley at last, assuming a very different appearance, and forcing the flourishing householder to stop out of astonishment, "I am sorry to say that your conduct is not extraordinary: and my own seems to amaze you, I will tell you something that may amaze you a little more, and I hope will frighten you. It is such men as you who madden the spirits and the patience of the poor and wretched; and if ever a convulsion comes in this country (which is very probable) recollect what I tell you; - you will have your house, which you refuse to put this miserable woman into, burnt over your head." "God bless me, sir! Dear me, sir!" exclaimed the frightened wretch, and fluttered into his mansion. The woman was then brought to our house, which was at some distance, and down a bleak path; and Mr. S. and her son were obliged to hold her till the doctor could arrive. It appeared that she had been attending this son in London, on a criminal charge made against him, the agitation of which had thrown her into the fits on their return. The doctor said that she would inevitably have perished had she lain there only a short time longer. The next day my friend sent mother and son comfortably home to Hendon, where they were well known, and whence they returned him thanks full of gratitude. Now go, ye 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. 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 |