Things were in this state, when one morning Miss Spinks, a young lady of a grave and intellectual cast of mind, with a face broad at the forehead and peaked at the chin, like a kite, called at the Spimkinses for the purpose of inquiring the character of a servant maid. The Spimkinses were delighted by such condescension. Miss Spinks was such a charming young woman! such a dear creature!--so well-bred, so well-dressed, and, above all, so well-informed! Such, for at least a month afterwards, was the hourly topic of conversation at the grocer’s table: it came up with the breakfast tray, it helped to digest the dinner, it served as a night-cap after supper, until at length old Spimkins, in consideration of his neighbour’s importance, was prevailed on to depart so far from his homely notions of household economy, as to allow his wife and children to return Miss Spinks’ visit. In due time, both parties, as a matter of course, became intimate; but as literature was all the rage at the common councilman’s, the Misses Spimkins were for a time at fault, until a seasonable supply of novels, procured secretly from a fashionable publisher in the Minories, enabled them to converse on a more equal footing. It was just about this period, that the Third Series of the Tales of My Landlord appeared. The Spinkses, who had heard from Alderman Dobbs that the descriptions were “uncommon like natur,” of course read it; so of necessity did the Spimkinses; and, as Miss Spinks kept an album, it came to pass that she one day commissioned Thomas Spimkins to copy into it a few of the most notable passages. On what slight circumstances do the leading events of life depend! The youth, delighted with his task, ventured, after concluding it, to interpolate some stanzas of his own; Miss Spinks inquired who was the author; when Tom, blushing, like _Mrs. Malaprop_, “confessed the soft impeachment,” was instantly pronounced a genius, and as such introduced by the Spinkses to all their high acquaintances. Genius! What a fatal talisman exists in that portentous word! How many industrious families has it led astray! How much common-sense has it shipwrecked! How many prospects, once bright and imposing, has it utterly, incurably blighted!