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half-extinguished fire, which left a part of its outline in deep shade, imparted to it an almost spectral character, if we can imagine a piece of furniture to be susceptible of any such effect.

It looked like a death-bed, and such, indeed, it might be termed; for its knotted mattress was pressed at this moment by Diedrich Hoffman, an old German, labouring under a fatal malady, who for upwards of forty years had carried on the business of a sugar-baker in Bristol, where he had amassed a handsome fortune by the profits of his trade, and by penurious habits, of which the rigour might be inferred from the slight description we have given of his abode. Naturally averse to all change, and well knowing that no removal can be effected without expence, he had continued to occupy his present residence from his first arrival in the city, grudging even the trifling expenditure necessary to renew its furniture,

the highest order of talent, the prominent personages bear sounding titles, maintain large establishments, and move only in the quarters consecrated to our aristocracy; the other actors in the drama being taken from inferior, not to say low, life, and rendered as vulgar and ridiculous as possible, that they may act as foils to their superiors.

Writers of this school, forgetting that there is an innate vulgarity, quite independent of external observances and forms, and quite as likely, therefore, to be encountered among the peerage as the peasantry, have confined it to certain conventional phrases, personal peculiarities, and domestic usages. Even if this narrow view be not opposed to Nature and to truth, it can hardly be denied that it has a mischievous tendency to widen the breach, where too great a severance and alienation of classes already forms the besetting sin of our social system.

As the passions of our common nature are equally irrespective of birth and locality, the middling ranks and those immediately beneath them, however unclassical may be their avocacations and abodes, surely present not less available materials to the Novelist, than the virtues and the vices of the higher orders. We have tragedies, such as the Gamester, George Barnwell, and others, where the pathos of the scene seems to be rendered more thrilling, and to come more immediately home to our business and bosoms, because the characters are taken from among the less elevated classes of society. The Germans and the French have novels exclusively illustrative of the manners of the people; and they who have read the works of MICHAEL RAYMOND, or even the single most affecting tale of "Le Maçon,” must admit that the adventures of artisans and shopkeepers are not less susceptible of deep. interest than the woes of coronetted grandeur

or repair its dilapidations, so that it had gradually fallen into a very forlorn state.

And yet, notwithstanding these flagrant manifestations of a sordid spirit, Diedrich Hoffman could hardly be termed a miser. True, he denied himself almost every gratification that other men covet, but it was because he differed from their tastes, and found more pleasure in foregoing than in enjoying the ordinary delights of the world. An habitual economist, a confirmed old bachelor, and something of a humourist, he would, nevertheless, occasionally perform a liberal or even a munificent action, without deviating in other respects from his customary parsimony. When subscriptions had been set on foot for public objects, his name had stood upon more than one occasion at the head of the list.

That he had not been impelled to these rare conquests over his niggardly disposition by the vanity of being reputed a rich man, we will

not affirm; but they proved, at all events, that he was not an inveterate or invariable miser, a fact of which he had offered more direct evidence by a recent alteration in his domestic establishment. When his health, which up to a late period had scarcely ever failed, began to give way, and he found himself sinking under the united attacks of age and illness, he began to feel, for the first time, the want of some companion in the house, who might relieve the tedium of confinement, minister to his amusement, and soothe the bed of sickness.

In one of those capricious freaks of charity, which sometimes in their spirit of opposition prompted him to assist and patronize any object whom all the rest of the world seemed determined to neglect, he had received into his counting-house an unhappy friendless being, who, after having struggled during the latter part of his life with poverty and misfortune, had supported his family, consisting of a wife