1831.] t My New Lodgings. 625 



until I had raised new recruits, or given the stragglers time to return to 

 their ranks. This was not the work of a few minutes. It required much 

 walking up and down the room, much scratching of the head, much 

 thumping of the table, and much mending of the pen. At length they 

 began to rally : one leading idea came so near within my reach, that I 

 laid hold of and secured it. " Aha !" I exclaimed, " I have got you at 

 last ; and to make sure of you, down you go on paper this very instant ; 

 down you go ; the world shall have you all the flutes in the kingdom 

 to the contrary notwithstanding." A single sentence from the next 

 room defeated my purpose and defrauded the world. " It is just Signer 

 Ritornelli's time ; I think I am almost perfect in that sonata/' Sig- 

 rior Ritornelli's time ! blissful announcement ! What heinous sin had I 

 perpetrated to incur s'uch a visitation ? I went through the deca- 

 logue. 



My next step was to settle my account, low as my finances were, and 

 sally forth in quest of a new lodging. " Well !" said I to myself, 

 " experientia docet. Musicians are as much to be dreaded by a literary 

 man as children. I shall insert clauses against both in my next agree- 

 ment." It cost me a good deal of perambulation to combine the two 

 conditions. In the first house I entered, a young lady in the parlour 

 was practising the ff Battle of Prague ;" she had just arrived at " the 

 cries of the wounded !" That, you know, would never answer ; so I 

 crossed the street to another house with " Lodgings for Single Gentle- 

 men'' upon the windows. A dame opened the door, surrounded with as 

 numerous a litter as Virgil's " sow of imperial augury," or the wife of 

 a country curate. The apartments, of course, were not exactly to my 

 mind. The drawing-room window of the third was open ; and a voice 

 as sonorous as that of the Hermit of Copmanhurst, thundering his De 

 profundis, was roaring, " Oh ! no, we never mention her," to a guitar 

 which semed to be cracking its strings to maintain its rightful place in 

 the performance. Several more attempts were equally unsuccessful. 

 But to be brief by dint of perseverance, I ultimately lighted upon 

 " exactly the thing I wanted." There was no child, male or female ; 

 neither flute, fiddle, nor so much as a jew's-harp from kitchen to attic ; 

 and, to crown all, my landlord was not only a bachelor, but a man of the 

 pen like myself, and of course personally concerned to have a studious 

 silence preserved upon his premises. I had it from his own lips 

 " Dabble a little in ink now and then the c cacoethes loquendi,' you 

 know take for granted, Sir, if I may take the liberty, you are a literary 

 man as well as myself?" I nodded assent, though I should rather have 

 been fraternized by a better classical scholar. But was this a time to be 

 hypercritical ? Here was every thing I . wanted a residence fit for 

 Silence herself; the street was a eul-de-sac : and so deep was the repose 

 of my new apartments, that " the tiniest mouse that creeps on floor" 

 could not journey across them unperceived. 



My first day in My New Lodgings I neither read nor wrote a syllable 

 not that my library took a long time to arrange, or my wardrobe 

 either : the former is anything but a dubia ccena ; and the latter might 

 vie with that of Curran, when he wrote to his mother for a supply of 

 eleven shirts, assuring her that in college every gentleman had a dozen. 

 But it was business enough for one day to contemplate the various 

 agremens of the quiet little creek where I had at length cast anchor, 

 and refit my shattered bark for a more prosperous voyage. It was not, 



M. M. New Series. VOL. XL No. G6. 4 L 



