'By thy ungallant bearing and sad mien, An inch appears the utmost thou couldst budge; Yet at the slightest nod, or hint, or sign, Round to the curb-stone patient dost thou trudge, School'd in a beckon, learned in a nudge; A dull-eyed Argus watching for a fare; Quiet and plodding, thou dost bear no grudge To whisking Tilburies or Phaetons rare, Curricles, or Mail-coaches, swift beyond compare.' Philosophising thus, he pull'd the check, And bade the coachman wheel to such a street; Who turning much his body, more his neck, Louted full low, and hoarsely did him greet." The tact here is so nice of the infirmities which are but too likely to beset our poor old friend, that we should only spoil it to say more. To pass then to the merits. One of the greatest helps to a sense or merit in other things is a consciousness of one's own wants. Do you despise a hackney-coach? Get tired; get old; get young again. Lay down your carriage, or make it less uneasily too easy. Have to stand up half-an-hour, out of a storm, under a gateway. Be ill, and wish to visit a friend who is worse. Fall in love, and want to sit next your mistress. Or if all this will not do, fall in a cellar. Ben Jonson, in a fit of indignation at the niggardliness of James the First, exclaimed, "He despises me, I suppose, because I live in an alley:--tell him his soul lives in an alley." We think we see a hackney-coach moving out of its ordinary patience, and hear it say, "You there, who sit looking so scornfully at me out of your carriage, are yourself the thing you take me for. Your understanding is a hackney-coach. It is lumbering, rickety, and at a stand. When it moves it is drawn by things like itself. It is at once the most stationary and the most servile of commonplaces. And when a good thing is put into it, it does not know it." But it is difficult to imagine a hackney-coach under so irritable an aspect. Hogarth has drawn a set of hats or wigs with countenances of their own. We have noticed the same thing in the faces of houses; and it sometimes gets in one's way in a landscape-painting, with the outlines of the rocks and trees. A friend tells us that the hackney-coach has its countenance, with gesticulation besides: and now he has pointed it out, we can easily fancy it. Some of them look chucked under the chin, some nodding, some coming at you sideways. We shall never find it easy, however, to fancy the irritable aspect above-mentioned. A hackney-coach always appeared to us the most quiescent of movables. Its horses and it, slumbering on a stand, are an emblem of all patience in creation, animate and inanimate. The submission with which the coach takes every variety of the weather, dust, rain, and wind, never moving but when some eddying blast makes its old body shiver, is only surpassed by the vital patience of the horses. Can anything better illustrate the poet's line about