at the goose, which indeed he drove with amazing celerity, sending it along at a rate nearly equal to the progress of a Parliamentary train; but his style of cutting was somewhat composite and florid, not distinguished by that severe simplicity of manner which was the glory of the earlier masters. In the hands of a Piercie Shafton, Benjamin might have proved a veritable treasure; Sir Thomas Urquhart would have descanted with enthusiasm on the quaint and oblique diversity of his shears, which seemed instinctively to dissever good broad-cloth into quincunxes more or less outrageous; but the age of Euphuism was gone, and neither elder, deacon, nor precentor, was in favour of slashed doublets. Benjamin was not only a tailor but a poet, and we fear it is a lamentable fact that the two trades are irreconcilable. The perpetrator of distichs is usually a bungler at cross-stitch: there is no analogy between the measurement of trousers and the measure of a Spenserian stanza. It will therefore be readily credited, that the business, when devolved upon Benjie, did not prosper as of old; and though Mansie did, in his advanced age, make one effort to retrieve the character of his firm by inventing a kind of paletot, which he denominated "a Fascinator," we have not been given to understand that the males of the royal family adopted it to the exclusion of all other upper garments of similar cut and pretension. Moreover, the prevailing influence and tendency of the age began to be felt in Dalkeith. Competition, as a maxim of political economy, was generally practised and understood: and a young schneider, who had served his apprenticeship with Mr Place of Westminster celebrity, opened an establishment for ready-made clothes, with a Greek title which would have puzzled an Homeric commentator. In process of time the Greek was opposed by a Hebrew, who ought to have been an especial favourite with his people, seeing that if any afflicted person had a fancy for rending his clothes, the garments supplied by Aaron and Son would have yielded to the slightest compulsion. A Polish emigrant next opened shop, and to the astonishment of the Dalkeithians, transferred their breeches' pockets from the waistband to the neighbourhood of their knees, and suggested frogs and braiding. Against this tide of innovation honest Mansie found it impossible to make head. Fortunately, being a saving creature, he had amassed a considerable sum of money, which, still more fortunately, he had abstained from investing in the Loanhead and Roslin Junction; and his annual income was such as to justify him in retiring from business to a pleasant villa on the banks of the Esk, where he now grows cabbages of such magnitude as to be recorded in an occasional newspaper paragraph, and cucumbers which have carried off the prize at several horticultural exhibitions. On the whole, Mr Wauch is a man decidedly to be envied, not only by those of his own trade, but by many