It is a very general impression that the system of auricular confession was given up at the Reformation. Such is by no means the case; every man and mother’s son in the country still keeps his _confessor_. By this epithet, it may be guessed, I mean that chief and most particular friend whom every man keeps about him—who stands his best man when he is married, and becomes his second when he fights a duel—his double, in short, or second self—a creature whom you almost always find with him when you call, and who either walks under his arm in the street, or is found waiting for him while he steps into some neighbouring shop, or, as the case may happen, is waited for by him. I make bold to say, there is not a trader any where who does not keep his confessor. The creature haunts the shop, till he almost seems the Genius of the Place, to the grievous prepossession of newspapers, and, what is more intolerable still, to the exclusive occupation of the ear of the worthy shopkeeper himself. The evening is the grand revel-time for confessors of this genus. Between eight and nine, you see them gathering to the shops of their respective victims, like fowl to roost. As you pass about nine, you observe, on looking in, that the discipline and rigour of shop-life has dissolved. Master, men, and boys, feel the approach of the moment of emancipation, with a peculiar salience of thought, alternating with a deep and tranquil delight. The confessor reigns in the spirit of this glorious hour, and his laugh, and his joke, and his news, and his proffered pinch, are listened to, re-echoed, and partaken of by his devotee, with a pleasure of the keenest nature, and ominous, you may make sure, of oysters and gin punch on the way home.