a notary, luxuriating in a wage of fifty pounds a-year, and a hunch of the first magnitude. Pert as a magpie, mischievous and confiding, devoted to the fair sex, and especially to its taller specimens, he is a fine subject for Monsieur de Kock, who gets him into all manner of queer scrapes, some not of the most refined description. The French hunchback, we must observe, is a genus apart--quite different from high-shouldered people of other countries. Far from being susceptible on the score of his dorsal protuberance, he views it in the light of an excellent joke, a benefaction of nature, placed upon his spine for the diversion of himself and his fellow-men. The words _bosse_ and _bossu_ (hunch and hunchback) have various idiomatic and proverbial applications in France. To laugh like a _bossu_, implies the _ne plus ultra_ of risibility: _se donner une bosse_--literally, to give one's-self a hunch--is synonymous with sharing in a jovial repast where much is eaten and more drunk. An excellent caricature in the _Charivari_, some years ago, represented a group of half-starved soldiers sitting round a fire of sticks at the foot of Atlas, and picking a dromedary's scull--"_Pas moyen de se donner une bosse!_" exclaims one of the dissatisfied conscripts. On twelve hundred francs per annum, poor Taquinet often makes the same complaint; and, in hopes of bettering his fortune, wanders into Germany on a matrimonial venture, there to be jilted by Fraulein Carottsmann, for a strolling player with one coat and three sets of buttons, who styles himself Marquis, because he has been occasionally hissed in the line of characters designated in France by that aristocratic denomination. Then there is a general of Napoleon's army who cannot write his name; and a buxom sutler and a handsome aide-de-camp, sundry grisettes, and the other _dramatis personæ_ habitually to be met with in the pages of Paul--the whole set forth in indifferent French, and garnished with buffoonery and impropriety, after the usual fashion of this zany of Parisian novelists.