594 The Dolson Family. 



very few propensities, and who, as we have before said, is the most 

 obedient of wives. 



Miss Juliana Dobson is a tall sentimental-looking and rather 

 pretty young 1 lady with dark hair and eyes, the former of which she 

 wears in long loose ringlets a la Juliet ; while she rolls about the 

 latter in the most romantic manner imaginable. She is a great 

 reader of poems and novels, or rather romances, and is scarcely ever 

 without a book in her hand, from which she occasionally favours her 

 auditors with an extract, which, however, generally reminds them 

 most forcibly of the ti-propos-des bottes. Such is Miss Juliana 

 Dobson, eldest daughter of Jeremiah Dobson, of the Worshipful 

 Company of Ironmongers, and Common Councilman for the City of 

 London. Of Miss Emily, the younger daughter, very common 

 character, very brief space, will suffice for describing. She had just 

 left a third-rate boarding school, where she had learnt a smattering 

 of French, to dance, to play upon the piano-forte ; the former patro- 

 nymic might, however, be well left out in Miss Emily's performances. 

 I shall not attempt to describe in words the wonderful effect of Miss 

 Emily's singing " Oh 1 leave me to my sorrows," to the appropriate 

 tune of " The merry Swiss Boy." The reader must aid us. Miss 

 Emily was a plump rosy girl of seventeen, and thought herself 

 (would, reader, you thought as much of me, would I could even think 

 as much of myself) the very acme of perfection. Unlike her sister, 

 she had not the least romance, and never dreamed of love in a cot- 

 tage : she determined to marry an [earl at least, that is, if she 

 could get one. She never doubted her ability to fascinate, but she 

 has not yet succeeded ; she is still unmarried, and might, I have 

 some reason to think, be now persuaded to accept of a viscount. 



The fifth personage of the group is a Polish refugee, the Count 

 Vandeneski, who was, however, strange to say, born in the County 

 of Galway, where he had lived to the mature age of five-and-twenty, 

 and whence he had accompanied his master in the dignified situation 

 of valet up the Rhine as far as Frankfort. On his return, passing 

 through London, the success of a countryman who, giving himself 

 out as a Polish nobleman, had married a rich cheesemonger's 

 daughter, induced Dennis O'Sullivan to try his luck in the matri- 

 monial lottery; and having picked up a smattering of German on 

 the Rhine, he concluded that it would do quite as well as Polish, and 

 up to the commencement of our story it certainly had. Here we 

 have him in the back parlour of the Dobsons, having resolved to 

 make one of the young ladies before introduced to the reader, a 

 countess. This whiskered gentleman spoke with a dreadful brogue, 

 which he passed off for a foreign accent, and interlarded his dis- 

 course pretty plentifully with the little German he knew, but not 

 unfrequently he drew upon his imagination for the invention of words 

 and phrases not to be found in the dictionary. He has just been de- 

 scribing the revolution of the Poles from imagination, shown a cut 

 upon his forehead inflicted by some stone or shillalah at a Connamera 

 fair-fight as the thrust of a Cossack lance, and is now describing the 

 beauties of the Rhine to Juliana, who has got " Childe Harold" before 

 her " k and the Castle Crag of Drachenfels ?" asks Juliana, " Musha 



