A Family Dinner! Pot-luck, as it is called, in Scotland--when the man's wife is in the sulks, the wife's man proportionably savage, the children blear-eyed from the recent blubber in the nursery--the governess afraid to lift her eyes from her plate--the aunt sourer than the vinegar cruet--and we--alas! the stranger, stepping in to take pot-luck--we, poor old Christopher North, thanklessly volunteering to help the cock-y-leekie, that otherwise would continue to smoke and steam unstirred in its truly classical utensil! What looking of inutterable things! As impossible to break the silence with your tongue, as to break pond-ice ten inches thick with your knuckle. In comes the cock that made the cock-y-leekie, boiled down in his tough antiquity to a tatter. He disappears among the progeny, and you are now tied to the steak. You find there employment sufficient to justify any silence; and hope during mastication that you have not committed any crime since Christmas, of an enormity too great to be expiated by condemnation to the sulks. A Literary Dinner! apparently the remains of the Seven Young Men sprinkled along both sides of the table--with here and there "a three-times skimmed sky-blue" interposed; on each side of the Lord of the Mansion, a philosopher--on each hand of the lady, a poet--somewhere or other about the board, a Theatrical Star--a Strange Fiddler--an Outlandish Traveller--and a Spanish Refugee. As Mr. Wordsworth rather naughtily sayeth, "All silent, and all damn'd!" Still the roof does not fall, although the chandelier burns dim in sympathy, "And all the air a solemn stillness holds."