beauty, strength, or talent, and more valuable than all. Many men have the tact to adapt themselves to the station and the society to which they have risen, however much above their own level; they acquire the habits and the tastes, seldom the feelings, of a gentleman. They act the character well; it is carefully studied, and on the whole well sustained; it is a correct and painstaking performance, and the points tell distinctly; but there is throughout that indirect appeal to the audience which marks it to be only acting. They are more studiously aristocratic than the aristocracy, and have a horror of vulgarity which is in itself essentially vulgar. And such a man was the dean of ----. On the philosophic principle of hating all to whom we are under obligations, if there was any thing he cordially detested, it was trade. His constant aim was to forget his unfortunate origin himself, if possible to lead others who knew him to forget it, and to keep strangers from knowing it at all. And as he shrank from every shape and sound plebeian, so he industriously cultivated every opening to "good society." There was not a member of his own college, graduate or under-graduate, of any pretensions to family, who could not speak from experience of the dean's capital dinners, and his invariable urbanity. No young honourable, or tenth cousin to an honourable, ever got into a row, that he had not cause to bless the dean's good offices for getting him out. And if some of the old stagers contented themselves with eating his dinners, and returning them in the proportion of one to five, the unsophisticated gratitude of youth, less cunning in the ways of the world, declared unhesitatingly, in its own idiomatic language, "that old Hodgett was a regular brick, and gave very beany feeds." And so his fame travelled far beyond his own collegiate walls, and out-college honourables and gentlemen-commoners were content to make the acquaintance, and eat the dinners that were so freely offered. And as the dean had really some cleverness, and "a well-assorted selection" of anecdotes and illustrations "from the best markets," (as his worthy father would have advertised it,) and could fill the chair at his own entertainments with ease if not with gracefulness, and moreover was not close with his purse-strings, and could always be reckoned safe for a L.20 note if a dun was troublesome, (well knowing that even under-graduates make exceptions in favour of debts of honour,) he became, among his younger friends especially, a very popular man. And when those who had enjoyed his good fare, and profited by his friendly offices with duns and proctors, found that, after all, he was "nobody," all they said was, that it was a pity, and that he was a monstrous good fellow none the less. And one invited him to spend the Christmas with him down at the governor's in Kent, where there was to be a regular houseful, and merry-making of all sorts, and