The same effect which the announcement of dinner produces on the stiff party in the drawing-room, is caused by the information of being alongside the quay, to the passengers of a packet. It is true the procession is not so formal in the latter as in the former case: the turbaned dowagers that take the lead in one, would, more than probably, be last in the other: but what is lost in decorum, is more than made up in hilarity. What hunting for carpet-bags! what opening and shutting of lockers! what researches into portmanteaus, to extricate certain seizable commodities, and stow them away upon the person of the owner, till at last he becomes an impersonation of smuggling, with lace in his boots, silk stockings in his hat, brandy under his waistcoat, and jewelry in the folds of his cravat. There is not an item in the tariff that might not be demonstrated in his anatomy: from his shoes to his night-cap, he is a living sarcasm upon the revenue. And, after all, what is the searching scrutiny of your Quarterly Reviewer, to the all- penetrating eye of an excise officer? He seems to look into the whole contents, of your wardrobe before you have unlocked the trunk “warranted solid leather,” and with a glance appears to distinguish the true man from the knave, knowing, as if by intuition, the precise number of cambric handkerchiefs that befits your condition in life, and whether you have transgressed the bounds of your station, by a single bottle. What admirable training for a novelist would a year or two spent in such duties afford; what singular views of life; what strange people must he see; how much of narrative would even the narrow limits of a hat-box present to him; and how naturally would a story spring from the rosy- cheeked old gentleman, paying his duty upon a “_pâté de fois-gras_” to his pretty daughter, endeavouring, by a smile, to diminish the tariff on her French bonnet, and actually captivate a custom-house officer by the charms of her “_robe a la Victorine_.”