eternal friendship to you, and who now, to your great discomfiture, as well as to the imminent peril of your good temper and manners, breaks boisterously in upon your tete-a-tete, to prove to you how well he keeps his oath, by nearly shaking your hand off, or perhaps dislocating your shoulder, by loudly protesting how rejoiced he is to see you, and by most heroically sacrificing himself, and his own valuable time, in kindly bestowing his fullest tediousness upon you, that he may give you the whole history of his life since he last saw you. Then, suppose you sit down to read some important speech, or leading article, in your favourite newspaper, or something which you wish to devour out of some much-talked-of pamphlet or review of the day, it is ten to one but you experience a similar interruption from some such kind and much attached friend. But the height of your misery is only attained, when you come to take refuge in the writing-room, in order to write a letter of more than ordinary importance, and requiring great care in the arrangement of its subject, as well as in the choice of its expressions. Then it is, that among those employed at the different tables, you are certain to find some two or more idle scribblers, who go not there really to write, but who, notwithstanding, waste more of the writing materials belonging to the club, than all the rest of its members put together, in order to give themselves importance, by an affectation of much business, and high correspondence. Amongst these there is probably one, who, after allowing you to get down to the bottom of your first page, and fairly into your subject, suddenly, and as if accidentally descries you, and rushing across to salute you, rivets himself on the floor close to your chair, and goes on ear-wigging you with his important secrets, whilst he is all the time curiously drinking in your's, from your half-written letter, which lies open before him. Or, if you should have the good fortune to escape from such a jackal as this, then you will find the other men of his kidney, who may be sitting at the different tables with the affectation of writing, carrying on such a battery of loud talk across the room, as altogether to distract your attention. In vain do you try to control your thoughts within their proper current. They are continually jostled aside by some half-caught sentence, which sets your mind working in some wrong direction, merely to have it again driven off at a tangent into some other, which is equally foreign to that subject to which you would confine it. In vain do you rub your brow, cover your eyes, and gnaw your pen; every thought but the right thought is forced upon you, until at last, in utter despair, you start to your feet, snatch up your blotted and often corrected letter, tear it into shreds, commit it to the flames, and, seizing your hat, you abruptly hurry homewards, duly execrating, as you go, all club-houses, and those many men of