before my imagination numberless incidents and personages no longer important, or no longer in existence. My scattered and once-loved schoolmates, their characters and their various fortunes, passed in rapid review before me; my schoolmaster, his wife, and all the gentry, and heads of families, whose orderly attendance at divine service on Sundays, while those well-remembered bells were "chiming for church," (but now gone and mouldering in the adjoining graves,) were again presented to my perceptions! With what pomp and form they used to enter and depart from their house of God! I still saw with the mind's eye the widow Hogarth, and her maiden relative, Richardson, walking up the aisle dressed in their silken sacks, their raised head-dresses, their black hoods, their lace ruffles, and their high-crook'd canes, preceded by their aged servant, Samuel; who, after he had wheeled his mistress to church in her Bath-chair, carried the prayer-books up the aisle, and opened and shut the pew! There too was the portly Dr. Griffiths, of the _Monthly Review_, with his literary wife in her neat and elevated wire-winged cap! And oftimes the vivacious and angelic Duchess of Devonshire, whose bloom had not then suffered from the canker-worm of pecuniary distress, created by the luxury of charity! Nor could I forget the humble distinction of the aged sexton, Mortefee, whose skill in psalmody enabled him to lead that wretched group of singers, whom Hogarth so happily portrayed; whose performance with the pitch-fork excited so much wonder in little boys; and whose gesticulations and contortions of head, hand, and body, in beating time, were not outdone even by Joah Bates in the commemorations of Handel! Yes, simple and happy villagers! I remember scores of you;--how fortunately ye had, and still have, escaped the contagion of the metropolitan vices, though distant but five miles; and how many of you have I conversed with, who, at an adult age, had never beheld the degrading assemblage of its knaveries and miseries! I revelled in the melancholy pleasure of these recollections, yielding my whole soul to that witchery of sensibility which magnifies the perception of being, till one of the bells was overset, when, the peal stopping, I had leisure to think on the rapid advance of the day, and on the consequent necessity of quickening my speed. * * * * * THE SKETCH-BOOK. NO. XLIV. * * * * * THE BLUE BOTTLE "A _fly_ your honour."--_Brighton Cliff_ Talk of musquitoes!--a musquito is a gentleman who honourably runs you through with a small sword, and from whom (as from a mad dog) we may easily seek a defence in--_muslin_.