the portrait now to be seen in the house in Henley Street, has a table made of the fame wood.

The veneration paid to these trifling remains fhows how naturally we affociate the work of art with the artist. The plays would have the fame excellence by whomfoever they might have been written. There is no intrinfic connection between them and the man William Shakespere. He has been long dead, and they remain a poffeffion for ever. But the mind refuses to view things from this abstract and cold point of view. It infifts upon tracing the work to the workman, and connects by fome wayward and irrational, but ftill natural procefs, "Lear," "Hamlet," and the reft of those wondrous poems, with a cup or a fnuff-box made of a piece of mulberry-tree!

CHAPTER X.

COCKNEYISM is one of the old inftitutions of the country which railroads have done much to modify. There was a time when barristers and attorneys used to live all the year round, to eat, drink, fleep, and keep their carriages, in the gloomy ftreets near the Old Bailey and Westminster Hall. Indeed, perfons now alive can recollect an eminent civilian who had a handfome house and establishment in Doctors' Commons, and never thought of leaving it. Publishers not only had their warehouses, but lived in Paternofter Row; tradesmen in Cheapfide, winter and fummer. Grub Street was the chosen abode of authors. Johnfon lived in Bolt Court, and thought the view down Fleet Street the finest prospect in England. The country was confidered a fort of wilderness, and a chance vifit to fome remote county was fufficient occasion for writing a book about shepherds and fhepherdeffes. London was the centre of intelligence, and he who was not up to

all its ways-who did not know the fashionable taverns, and could not call the waiters at them by their Chriftian names-was called a gull and a ninny.

Railroads have changed all this. Lawyers, bankers, tradesmen, and innkeepers, and even publishers and authors, now live ten, twenty, or thirty miles from town, in a country house with a demefne and farm attached to it, where they spend, upon growing grapes and pines, turnips and mangold wurtzel, prize beef and mutton, pheasants and partridges, the money which has been fpun from their brains, or abstracted from their clients' or customers' pockets in a gloomy den in the City. A friend and neighbour of mine, an eminent lawyer, who is no less remarkable for his legal acumen than for his skill as a sportsman, and who in the very whirlwind of his practice has always given two days a-week to shooting or fishing, was complaining one day to the farmer who fupplied him with corn for his pheasants, of the quantity of barley which appeared against him in his bill. "Ah!" fays Hodge, "you don't mind a quarter or two o' barley more or lefs in a half-year! You'll make it all right when you git a robbin' on 'em up in Lonon!" And Hodge was right. You pass an exquifitely kept place which puts the old fquire's quite to the blush, and you are told that it belongs to the grocer in Piccadillywhere you got a jar of ginger the

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