If pronouns had been tangible things, Mrs. Aurelia Sparr would long ago have worn out the first person singular. Her sentences begin as regularly with “I,” as the town-crier’s address does with “O yes,” or as a French letter ends with “l’assurance des sentimens distingués.” While living with another lady in daily and inevitable intercourse, never was she known to say, “We shall see--we shall hear--we can go--we must read.” It was always “I, I, I.” In the illusion of her egotism, she once went so far as to make a verbal monopoly of the weather, and exclaimed, on seeing the rosy streaks in the evening sky, “I think I shall have a fine day to-morrow.” If you forget yourself so far, in the querulous loquacity of sickness, as to tell her of any ailment, as “My sore-throat is worse than ever to-night”--she does not rejoin, “What will you take?” or “Colds are always worse of an evening, it may be better to-morrow;” or propose flannel or gargle, or any other mode of alleviation, like an ordinary person; no! she flies back from you to herself with the velocity of a coiled-up spring suddenly let go; and says, “I had just such another sore-throat at Leicester ten years ago, I remember it was when I had taken down my chintz bed-curtains to have them washed and glazed.” Then comes a mammoth of an episode, huge, shapeless, and bare of all useful matter: telling all she said to the laundress, with the responses of the latter. You are not spared an item of the complete process: first, you are blinded with dust, then soaked in lye, then comes the wringing of your imagination and the calico, then the bitterness of the gall to refresh the colours; then you are extended on the mangle, and may fancy yourself at the court of king Procrustes, or in a rolling-press. All the while you are wondering how she means to get round to the matter in question, your sore-throat.--Not she! _she cares_ no more for your sore-throat than the reviewers do for a book with the title of which they head an article; your complaint was the peg, and her discourse the voluminous mantle to be hung on it. Some people talk _with_ others, and they are companions; others _at_ their company, and they are declaimers or satirists; others _to_ their friends, and they are conversationists or gossips, according as they talk of things or persons. Mrs. Aurelia Sparr talks neither to you, nor with you, nor at you. Listen attentively, or show your weariness by twenty devices of fidgetiness and preoccupation, it is all the same to Mrs. Aurelia Sparr. She talks spontaneously, from an abstract love of hearing her own voice; she can no more help talking, than a ball can help rolling down an inclined plane. She will quarrel with you at dinner, for she is extremely peevish and addicted to growling over her meals; and by no means so nice as to what comes out of her mouth as to what goes into it; and then, before you can fold your napkin, push back your chair and try