he smiles sweetly, strokes his magnificent
flaxen whiskers, and looks up resignedly at
the sky. I sometimes fancy that he stands
too high to hear what his dwarf of a wife
says. For his sake, poor man, I hope this
view of the matter may be the true one.)

Where was I? O! out walking, and
happening to meet with Mr. and Mrs. Tincklepaw.
She has had a quarrel with her
husband at home, and this is how she contrives
to let me know it.

"Delightful weather, dear, is it not?" I
say, as we shake hands.

"Charming, indeed," says Mrs. Tincklepaw.
"Do you know, love, I am so glad you made
that remark to me, and not to Mr.
Tincklepaw?"

"Really?" I ask. "Pray tell me why?"

"Because," answers the malicious creature,
"if you had said it was a fine day to Mr.
Tincklepaw, I should have been so afraid of his
frowning at you directly, and saying, 'Stuff!
talk of something worth listening to, if you
talk at all.' What a love of a bonnet you
have got on! and how Mr. Tincklepaw would
have liked to be staying in your house
when you were getting ready to-day to go
out. He would have waited for you so
patiently, dear. He would not have stamped
in the passage; and no such words as, 'Deuce
take the woman! is she going to keep me
here all day?' would by any possibility have
escaped his lips. Don't, love! don't look at
the shops, while Mr. Tincklepaw is with us.
He might say,  'Oh, bother! you're always
wanting to buy something!' I shouldn't
like that to happen. Should you, dear?"

Once more. Say I meet Mr. and Mrs.
Tincklepaw at a dinner-party, given in honour
of a bride and bridegroom. From the instant,
when she enters the house, Mrs. Tincklepaw
never has her eye off the young couple. She
looks at them with an expression of
heartbroken curiosity. Whenever they happen to
speak to each other, she instantly suspends
any conversation in which she is engaged, and
listens to them with a mournful eagerness.
When the ladies retire, she gets the bride into
a corner, appropriates her to herself for the
rest of the evening, and persecutes the
wretched young woman in this manner:—

"May I ask, is this your first dinner, since
you came back?"

"O, no! we have been in town for some
weeks."

"Indeed? I should really have thought,
now, that this was your first dinner."

"Should you? I can't imagine why."

"How very odd, when the reason is as
plain as possible! Why, I noticed you all
dinner time, eating and drinking what you
liked, without looking at your husband for
orders. I saw nothing rebellious in your face
when you eat all these nice sweet things at
dessert. Dear! dear! don't you understand?
Do you really mean to say that your husband
has not begun yet? Did he not say, as you
drove here to day, 'Now, mind, I'm not
going to have another night's rest broken,
because you always choose to make yourself
ill with stuffing creams and sweets, and all
that sort of thing'? No!!! Mercy on me,
what an odd man he must be! Perhaps he
waits till he gets home again? O, come,
come, you don't mean to tell me that he
doesn't storm at you frightfully, for having
every one of your glasses filled with wine,
and then never touching a drop of it, but
asking for cold water instead, at the very
elbow of the master of the house? If he says,
'Cursed perversity, and want of proper tact'
once, I know he says it a dozen times. And
as for treading on your dress in the hall, and
then bullying you before the servant, for not
holding it up out of his way, it's too common
a thing to be mentioned—isn't it? Did you
notice Mr. Tincklepaw particularly? Ah, you
did, and you thought he looked good-natured?
No! no! don't say any more; don't say you
know better than to trust to appearances.
Please do take leave of all common sense and
experience, and pray trust to appearances,
without thinking of their invariable
deceitfulness, this once. Do, dear, to oblige me."

I might fill pages with similar examples of
the manners and conversation of this intolerable
Lady-Bore. I might add other equally
aggravating characters, to her character and
to Miss Sticker's, without extending my
researches an inch beyond the circle of my own
acquaintance. But I am true to my unfeminine
resolution to write as briefly as if I were
a man; and I feel, moreover, that I have said
enough, already, to show that I can prove
my case. When a woman like me can
produce, without the least hesitation, or the
slightest difficulty, two such instances of
Lady-Bores as I have just exhibited, the
additional number which she might pick out of
her list, after a little mature reflection, may
be logically inferred by all impartial readers.
In the meantime, I trust I have succeeded
sufficiently well in my present purpose to induce
our next great satirist to pause before he, too,
attacks his harmless fellow-men, and to make
him turn his withering glance in the direction of
our sex. Let all rising young gentlemen who
are racking their brains in search of
originality, take the timely hint which I have
given them in these pages. Let us have a
new fictitious literature, in which not only
the Bores shall be women, but the villains
too. Look at Shakespeare—do, pray, look at
Shakespeare. Who is most in fault, in that
shocking business of the murder of King
Duncan? Lady Macbeth, to be sure! Look
at King Lear, with a small family of only
three daughters, and two of the three,
wretches; and even the third an aggravating
girl, who can't be commonly civil to he own
father in the first Act, out of sheer
contradiction, because her elder sisters happen to
have been civil before her. Look at Desdemona,
who falls in love with a horrid copper-