in pay, had they not been all bought up at that time for the election. They invited the dancing men, and the dancing women, and the gormandizers, and the epicures of the city, to come and make merry at their expense; and the dancing men, and the dancing women, and the epicures, and the gormandizers, did come; and they did make merry at their expense; and they eat, and they drank, and they capered, and they danced, and they-laughed at their entertainers.

Then commenced the hurry and the bustle, and the mighty nothingness of fashionable life;-such rattling in coaches! such flaunting in the street! such slamming of box-doors at the theatre! such a tempest of a bustle and unmeaning noise wherever they appeared! The Giblets were seen here and there and everywhere;-they visited everybody they knew, and everybody they did not know; and there was no getting along for the Giblets. Their plan at length succeeded. By dint of dinners, of feeding and frolicking the town, the Giblet family worked themselves into notice, and enjoyed the ineffable pleasure of being for ever pestered by visitors, who cared nothing about them; of being squeezed, and smothered, and parboiled at nightly balls and evening tea parties they were allowed the privilege of forgetting the very few old friends they once possessed;-they turned their noses up in the wind at everything that was not genteel; and their superb manners and sublime affectation at length left it no longer a matter of doubt that the Giblets were perfectly in the style.

SALMAGUNDL

FRENCHMEN.

In my mind there's no position more positive and unexceptionable than that most Frenchmen, dead or alive, are born dancers. I came pounce upon this discovery at the assembly, and I immediately noted it down in my register of indisputable facts -the public shall know all about it. As I never dance cotillions, holding them to be monstrous distorters of the human frame, and tantamount in their operations to being broken and dislocated on the wheel, I generally take occasion, while they are going on, to make my remarks on the company. In the course of these observations, I was struck with the energy and eloquence of sundry limbs, which seemed to be flourishing about without appertaining to anybody. After much investigation and difficulty, I at length traced them to their respective owners, whom I found to be all Frenchmen to a man. Art may have meddled somewhat in these affairs, but nature certainly did more. I have since been considerably employed in calculation on this subject; and by the most accurate computation I have determined, that a Frenchman passes at least three-fifths of his time between the heavens and the earth, and partakes eminently of the nature of a gossamer or a soap bubble. One of these jack-a-lantern heroes, in taking a figure, which neither Euclid nor Pythagoras himself could demonstrate, unfortunately wound himself-I mean his foot-his better part--in a lady's cobweb muslin robe; but

perceiving it in an instant, he set himself a-spinning the other way, like a top, unravelled his step, without omitting one angle or curve, and extricated himself without breaking a thread of the lady's dress! he then sprung up like a sturgeon, crossed his feet four times, and finished this wonderful evolution by quivering his left leg, as a cat does her paw when she has accidentally dipped it in water. No man "of woman born," who was not a Frenchman, or a mountebank, could have done the like.

SALMAGUNDI.

THE WIFE.

I HAVE often had occasion to remark the fortitude with which women sustain the most overwhelming reverses of fortune. Those disasters which break down the spirit of a man, and prostrate him in the dust, seem to call forth all the energies of the softer sex, and give such intrepidity and elevation to their character, that at times it approaches to sublimity. Nothing can be more touching than to behold a soft and tender female, who had been all weakness and dependence, and alive to every trivial roughness, while treading the prosperous paths of life, suddenly rising in mental force to be the comforter and supporter of her husband under misfortune, and abiding, with unshrinking firmness, the bitterest blasts of adversity.

As the vine which has long twined its graceful