'Well, sir, the soul of wit is brevity; we want a place for an approaching combat between my friend here and a brave from town. Passing by your broad acres this fine morning, we saw a pightle, which we deemed would suit. Lend us that pightle, and receive our thanks; 'twould be a favour, though not much to grant: we neither ask for Stonehenge nor for Tempe.' My friend looked somewhat perplexed; after a moment, however, he said, with a firm but gentlemanly air, 'Sir, I am sorry that I cannot comply with your request.' 'Not comply!' said the man, his brow becoming dark as midnight; and with a hoarse and savage tone, 'Not comply! why not?' 'It is impossible, sir; utterly impossible.' 'Why so?' 'I am not compelled to give my reasons to you, sir, nor to any man.' 'Let me beg of you to alter your decision,' said the man in a tone of profound respect. 'Utterly impossible, sir; I am a magistrate.' 'Magistrate! then fare-ye-well, for a green-coated buffer and a Harmanbeck!'" Lavengro--our fine fellow--it is not a thing to boast of, that you have, occasionally put on the gloves with Jack Thurtell! Rejecting the profession of the law, our author, after the death of his father, started for London, in the hopes of a literary engagement; his sole credentials being a letter to a publisher from an eccentric German teacher, and two bundles of manuscript--being translations respectively from the Welsh and the Danish. Of course nobody would publish them; and the bookseller to whom he had been recommended would do nothing better for him than give him an order to compile a new series of the Newgate Calendar, at worse than hodman's wages. This portion of the story is very dull, and abounds in silly caricature. The struggles of the aspirant to literary distinction fail to excite in us the slightest degree of commiseration, because they are manifestly unreal; and the episodes of London life, though intended to be startling, are simply stupid. Thus, we have an Armenian merchant, whose acquaintance Mr Borrow makes by apprehending a thief while making free with his pocket-book--a merchant, only less sordid and fond of money than a Jew, whom, nevertheless, the author persuades to employ the whole of his realised fortune in making war upon the Persians! It is to be regretted that Mr Borrow does not favour us with his dukkeripen. Then there is the aforesaid thief, whom Mr Borrow again encounters at Greenwich fair, in the possession of a thimble-rig table, and who makes confidential proposals to him to act the subsidiary part of "bonnet." It was perhaps as well that Tawno Chikno's idea of investing the author with the honorary and fistic title of Cooro-mengro was not adopted, seeing that Mr Borrow abstained from doubling-up the scoundrel at the first hint of the kind. Then there is an applewoman who kept a stall on London