unphilosophical, than to sit ruefully as well as whistfully, with your face inconsistently playing at longs and your hand at shorts,--getting hypped as well as pipped,--“talking of Hoyle,” as the City lady said, “but looking like winegar,” and betraying as keen a sense of the profit and loss, as if the _pack_ had turned you into a _pedlar_. [Illustration: “ON THE CARD-RACK.”] But I am digressing; and turning my back, as Lord Castlereagh would have said, on my face. The portrait, then, is genuine--“an ill-favoured thing, Sir,” as Touchstone says, “but mine own.” For its quarrel with the rules of Lavater there is precedent. I remember seeing on Sir Thomas Lawrence’s easel, an unfinished head of Mr. Wilberforce, so very merry, so rosy, so good-fellowish, that nothing less than the Life and Correspondence recently published could have persuaded me that he was really a serious character. A memoir, therefore, would be the likeliest thing to convince the world that the physiognomy prefixed to this number is actually Hood’s Own:--indeed a few of the earlier chapters would suffice to clear up the mystery, by proving that my face is only answering in the affirmative, the friendly enquiry of the Poet of all circles--“Has sorrow thy young days shaded?”--and telling the honest truth of one of those rickety constitutions which, according to Hudibras, seem “---- as if intended For nothing else but to be mended.” To confess the truth, my vanity pricked up its ears a little at the proposition of my Publisher. There is something vastly flattering in the idea of appropriating the half or quarter of a century, mixing it up with your personal experience, and then serving it out as your own Life and Times. On casting a retrospective glance, however, across Memory’s waste, it appeared so literally a waste that vanity herself shrank from the enclosure act, as an unpromising speculation. Had I foreseen, indeed, some five-and-thirty years ago, that such a demand would be made upon me, I might have laid myself out on purpose, as Dr. Watts recommends, so as “to give of every day some good account at last.” I would have lived like a Frenchman, for effect, and made my life a long dress rehearsal of the future biography. I would have cultivated incidents “pour servir,” laid traps for adventures, and illustrated my memory like Rogers’s, by a brilliant series of Tableaux. The earlier of My Seven Stages should have been more Wonder Phenomenon Comet and Balloon-like, and have been timed to a more Quicksilver pace than they have travelled; in short, my Life, according to the tradesman’s promise, should have been “fully equal to bespoke.” But alas! in the absence of such a Scottish second-sight, my whole course of existence up to the present moment would hardly furnish materials for one of those “bald biographies” that content the old gentlemanly pages of Sylvanus Urban. Lamb, on being applied to for a Memoir of