"Spends a deal of money on his dress,
ma'am."

"It must be admitted," said Mrs. Sparsit,
"that it's very tasteful."

"Yes, ma'am," returned Bitzer, "if that's
worth the money."

"Besides which, ma'am," resumed Bitzer,
while he was polishing the table, "he looks
to me as if he gamed."

"It's immoral to game," said Mrs. Sparsit.

"It's ridiculous, ma'am," said Bitzer,
"because the chances are against the
players."

Whether it was that the heat prevented
Mrs. Sparsit from working, or whether it
was that her hand was out, she did no work
that night. She sat at the window, when the
sun began to sink behind the smoke; she sat
there, when the smoke was burning red, when
the color faded from it, when darkness
seemed to rise slowly out of the ground, and
creep upward, upward, up to the house-tops,
up the church steeple, up to the summits of
the factory chimneys, up to the sky. Without
a candle in the room, Mrs. Sparsit sat at the
window, with her hands before her, not
thinking much of the sounds of evening:
the whooping of boys, the barking of dogs,
the rumbling of wheels, the steps and voices
of passengers, the shrill street cries, the clogs
upon the pavement when it was their hour
for going by, the shutting-up of shop-shutters.
Not until the light porter announced that
her nocturnal sweetbread was ready, did
Mrs. Sparsit arouse herself from her reverie,
and convey her dense black eyebrows—by
that time creased with meditation, as if they
needed ironing out—up stairs.

"O, you Fool!" said Mrs. Sparsit, when
she was alone at her supper. Whom she
meant, she did not say; but she could scarcely
have meant the sweetbread.

JOHN DUNTON WAS A CITIZEN.

Many thanks to our modern literary antiquaries
for the curious diaries and amusing
collections of old letters, which afford us such
pleasant glimpses of social life in long past
times. Many thanks, too, to the worthy
inditers of these long-forgotten relics—good,
quiet souls, many of them—who little thought,
when they were simply jotting down some
passing occurrence for their own exclusive
use, or detailing to some loving kinsman a
piece of family news, or the gossip of the
neighbourhood, that after generations had
passed away, they would appear in print,
and be quoted and reviewed. Thanks,
also, to those egotistical writers, numerous in
every age, though mostly enjoying but an
ephemeral reputation, who, scorning private
diary and confidential correspondence, claimed
the public for their friend, and sent forth the
story of their unsuccessful struggles, their
misfortunes—always, according to them,
unmerited—their wrongs, and their grievances,
in small pica, and bound in strong sheep or
calf.

Next to old newspapers we have found no
species of composition more suggestive, and
more illustrative than these homely prosing
books, where in the midst of dull details, of
which the public whom the writer addressed,
cared but little, and we, its great-great-
grandchildren, of course, still less, some sketch of the
public characters of the day, some vivid
notice of some recent public event, some
picture of times passed away for ever, may be
found, and found nowhere else. Among this
class of publications is one volume, which
attracted some notice on its appearance,
almost a hundred and fifty years ago, and
which, among collectors of old books, is not
wholly forgotten, but which few of our
readers have perhaps ever heard of. It is
the autobiography of a London bookseller,
one John Dunton:

John Dunton was a citizen
    Of credit and renown,

who dealt with left-legged Tonson, and with
Thomas Guy when he kept shop in Lombard
Street; who employed Elkanah Settle to do
his poetry, and the author of the Turkish
Spy his prose; who published many a
volume during the feverish times of James
the Second, and the prosperous years
succeeding the Revolution—John Dunton, of
the Black Raven, opposite the Poultry
Compter, who, in seventeen hundred and
five, turned writer himself, and gave the
world the history of his life and errors: and,
more amusing still, pen-and-ink portraits of
the various bookmakers and booksellers,
with whom he had been associated.

Determined to begin at the beginning, and
with sufficient minuteness too, John tells
us that he was born in sixteen hundred and
fifty-nine, was very weakly, and so small,
that he was placed in a quart pot, which
contained him very easily; a process this,
not very well adapted, as we think, to
promote the health of a sickly new-born
infant. From this, his first ordeal, he seems
to have escaped scathless; so, after
being duly swathed and rocked, and spoon-
fed, according to the manner of dealing
with babies of his day, and then put into the
go-cart, he was in process of time set to his
hornbook—which he hated, while he set
himself to mischief—which he much preferred.
This preference was very trying to his father,
a country clergyman who hoped that his
eldest son might follow his calling—the
mother had died before he was a year old—so
he was sent to a neighbouring school. But
primer, and Latin grammar were as distasteful
to the boy as his hornbook; and the father
was reluctantly compelled to give up the
cherished hope of seeing his son in the
Church, and to seek out some secular
calling. From the notices Dunton gives us of
his father, he seems to have been an