Besides Mr. O’Roarer and his fellows already described, there is the Honourable Simperkin Blushington, that pleasing novelist and Oriental traveller. A little to the left, and scowling at the Honourable Simperkin fearfully, is Leathers, the author of “A Jaunt to Jericho” and “Seven Years in a Penal Settlement.” Leathers wears a huge cut-velvet waistcoat, that looks like a fragment from some tapestried window-curtain. He is not at all clever, is Leathers—has no humour, observation, or power of description; but he has got a name among the book-selling trade, somehow, as a “good travelling hand”—a safe man for two volumes royal octavo with plates and a map—and so soon does any foreign country, from Canton to British Columbia, begin, from political or other causes, to attract public attention, so soon is Leathers commissioned to write his two bulky volumes of travels therein. Ill-natured people say that he keeps particulars relative to geography pigeon-holed in his library, and that he never went further than Boulogne, in the days of the five-shilling fares; but Leathers gets his price, and can afford to laugh at the evil-speaking. Bonassus, the publisher, of Bumpus Street, will have Leathers’s portrait in the next edition of “Rambles in the Island of Perim.” I am sure it is very ungallant in me to have been so long silent regarding the ladies who grace the literary conversazione with their presence. A man must be, indeed, a brute who could pass over the charms of Miss Withers, aged forty, authoress of “Crackings of the Heartstrings,” “Shudderings of the Soul,” “Crinklings of the Spirit-skin,” “Eyeball Darts,” and other pathetic lyrics. Miss Withers once kept a boarding-school, but gradually languished into poetry. She attained considerable celebrity in the time of the Annuals, but on the downfall of those amusing ephemerides, she betook herself to history, and is the writer of “Lives of the Wet Nurses of the Princesses of England,” “Memorials of celebrated Bedchamber Women,” and “The Silversticks in Waiting before the Conquest”—all works replete with critical acumen, and brimful of historical lore, though following a little too closely in the footsteps of a lady who has written an admirable and genuine History concerning some Queens of England. Miss Withers, however, has done very well for her publishers and for herself. She is one of those authoresses who, dying, would never wish to blot out a line they had written, simply because Heaven has gifted them with a happy mental cecity that prevents them from discerning that nine-tenths of their works should never have been written at all. You may see Miss Withers any day in the British Museum Reading-room, vigorously compiling away at the desk marked “for ladies only.” She has piles of books around her; she makes the attendants’ lives a torment to them with the flying squadrons of book-tickets she deposits at the bar; she walks about