The evening of Thursday, the 15th of February, 1827, was one of the most delightful I ever remember to have spent. I was alone; my heart beat lightly; my pulse was quickened by the exercise of the morning; my blood flowed freely through my veins, as meeting with no checks or impediments to its current, and my spirits were elated by a multitude of happy remembrances and of brilliant hopes. My apartments looked delightfully comfortable, and what signified to me the inclemency of the weather without. The rain was pattering upon the sky-light of the staircase; the sharp east wind was moaning angrily in the chimney; but as my eye glanced from the cheerful blaze of the fire to the ample folds of my closed window-curtains--as the hearth-rug yielded to the pressure of my foot, while, beating time to my own music, I sung, in rather a louder tone than usual, my favourite air of "_Judy O'Flannegan_;"--the whistling of the wind, and the pattering of the rain, only served to enhance in my estimation the comforts of my home, and inspire a livelier sense of the good fortune which had delivered me from any evening engagements. It may be questioned, whether there are any hours in this life, of such unmixed enjoyment as the few, the very few, which a young bachelor is allowed to rescue from the pressing invitations of those dear friends, who want another talking man at their dinner tables, or from those many and wilily-devised entanglements which are woven round him by the hands of inevitable mothers, and preserve entirely to himself.--Talk of the pleasure of repose! What repose can possibly be so sweet, as that which is enjoyed on a disengaged day during the laborious dissipations of a London life?--Talk of the delights of solitude! Spirit of Zimmerman!--What solitude is the imagination capable of conceiving so entirely delightful, as that which a young unmarried man possesses in his quiet lodging, with his easy chair and his dressing-gown, his beef-steak, and his whisky and water, his nap over an old poem or a new novel, and the intervening despatch of a world of little neglected matters, which, from time to time, occur to recollection between the break of the stanzas or the incidents of the story?