The prime advantage of Mrs. Tyler’s acquaintance to the Varley family, consisted in the circumstance that that lady and her daughter boarded at what they called one of the most fashionable houses in the city. Mrs. Tyler despised housekeeping; it confined one so to the mercy of servants, besides _company_ made it so troublesome and expensive. The Miss Varleys could go and board at the same place in the winter, and Mrs. Tyler would be so very kind and condescending as to “take all the trouble of _chaperoning_ them into the society of the ‘upper ten thousand,’ and nobody could with any certainty predict what advantages might accrue; perhaps a splendid settlement, perhaps”—I know not how many inducements she possessed, all of which sounded golden enough in the ears of the Miss Varleys when they made her acquaintance at —— Beach the season before, and insured for her what she intended, an invitation to the country when it was genteel to go into the country without such a bill of expense. The sphere in which Mrs. Tyler actually moved was only in the same pseudo-genteel orbit with the Mrs. Washington Potts’s, Mrs. De Perouk’s and a similar galaxy of inferior magnitude, to whose acquaintance and real claims to respect our shrewd and gifted countrywoman, has introduced so many delighted and instructed readers. Blessings on her simplicity, and on her two-edged satire; blessings on her mind and her pen, for holding up a mirror before the face of society, in which it may see not only its lineaments of loveliness, but also its deformities. Mrs. Tyler was a very small, _dried-up_ woman, if I may be tolerated for the expression, though a row of beautiful porcelain teeth displayed themselves whenever she parted her parched and skinny lips; her cheeks were most unnaturally rosy—I should have said _rougey_! A profusion of smooth and glossy ringlets adorned her head, and her whole dress was so in the extreme of fashion, there could have been, indeed, but a paltry difference between her “polar and equatorial diameter.” Brilliants sparkled in her gay caps, among the ribbons and roses; gems flashed on her withered hands; “tinkling ornaments, cauls, round tires like the moon, chains, and bracelets, and mufflers, bonnets and head-bands, and tablets, earrings and rings, changeable suits of apparel, mantles, and wimples, and crisping-pins, glasses, fine linen, hoods and veils,” figuratively speaking, the Prophet’s whole catalogue of a Judean toilette, was in requisition, with many modern inventions, at which a Judean maiden would have stood aghast, to make a vain old woman young again! O, miserable ambition!