Nisbet of ——, in Lanarkshire, originally a landed gentleman and an advocate at the Scottish bar, was a blood of the first water in the dissolute decade 1780-90, when, if we are to believe Provost Creech, it was a gentleman’s highest ambition, in his street dress and manner of walking, to give an exact personation of the character of Filch in the Beggars’ Opera. Nisbet at that period dressed a good deal above Filch, however he might resemble him in gait. He had a coat edged all round with gold lace, wore a gold watch on each side (an extravagant fashion then prevalent), and with his cane, bag-wig, and gold-buckled shoes, was really a fine figure of the pre-revolutionary era. His house was in the Canongate—a good flat in Chessels’s Court—garrisoned only by a female servant called Nanny. Nisbet at length squandered away the whole of his estate, and became a _victim_. All the world fell away from him; but Nanny still remained. From the entailed family flat in Chessels’s Court, he had to remove to a den somewhere about the Netherbow: Nanny went with him. Then came the period of wretchedness: Nanny, however, still stuck fast. The unfortunate gentleman could not himself appear in his woe-begone attire upon those streets where he had formerly shone a resplendent sun; neither could he bring his well-born face to solicit his former friends for subsidies. Nanny did all that was necessary. Foul day and fair day, she was to be seen gliding about the streets, either petitioning tradesmen for goods to her master on credit, or collecting food and money from the houses of his acquaintance. If a liquid alms was offered, she had a white tankard, streaked with smoky-looking cracks, for its reception; if the proffered article was a mass of flesh, she had a plate or a towel. There never was such a forager. Nisbet himself used to call her “true and trusty,” by way of a compliment to her collective powers; and he finally found so much reason to appreciate her disinterested attachment, that, on reaching the usual fatal period of fifty, he made her his wife! What was the catastrophe of their story, I never heard. The second, and only other instance of the _fag-victim_ which can be given here, is of a still more touching character than the above, and seems to make it necessary for the writer of this trifling essay to protest, beforehand, against being thought a scoffer at the misery of his fellow creatures. He begs it to be understood, that, however light be the language in which he speaks, he hopes that he can look with no other than respectful feelings upon human nature, in a suffering, and, more especially, a self-denying form. Some years ago, there flourished, in one of the principal thoroughfares of Edinburgh, a fashionable perfumer, the inheritor of an old business, and a man of respectable connections, who, falling into dissolute habits, became of course very much embarrassed, and, finally, “unfortunate.” In his shop,