In my next, reader, I may perhaps give you some account of my cousin Bridget--if you are not already surfeited with cousins--and take you by the hand, if you are willing to go with us, on an excursion which we made a summer or two since, in search of _more cousins_-- Through the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire. MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits--yet so, as "with a difference." We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings--as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are rather understood, than expressed; and once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and complained that I was altered. We are both great readers in different directions. While I am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, whereof our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teazes me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must have a story--well, ill, or indifferently told--so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune in fiction--and almost in real life--have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinions--heads with some diverting twist in them--the oddities of authorship please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of any thing that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing goes down with her, that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy. She "holds Nature more clever." I can pardon her blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Religio Medici; but she must apologise to me for certain disrespectful insinuations, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, touching the intellectuals of a dear favourite of mine, of the last century but one--the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous,--but again somewhat fantastical, and original-brain'd, generous Margaret Newcastle. It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have wished, to have had for her associates and mine, free-thinkers--leaders, and disciples, of novel philosophies and systems; but she neither wrangles with, nor accepts, their opinions. That which was good and venerable to her, when a child, retains its authority over her mind still. She never juggles or plays tricks with her understanding.