As low as to the fiends.

I am no longer ******, clerk to the Firm of &c. I am Retired Leisure.
I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by
my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace,
nor with any settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from. They tell
me, a certain _cum dignitate_ air, that has been buried so long with
my other good parts, has begun to shoot forth in my person. I grow
into gentility perceptibly. When I take up a newspaper, it is to read
the state of the opera. _Opus operatum est_. I have done all that I
came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest
of the day to myself.




THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING


It is an ordinary criticism, that my Lord Shaftesbury, and Sir William
Temple, are models of the genteel style in writing. We should prefer
saying--of the lordly, and the gentlemanly. Nothing can be more unlike
than the inflated finical rhapsodies of Shaftesbury, and the plain
natural chit-chat of Temple. The man of rank is discernible in both
writers; but in the one it is only insinuated gracefully, in the other
it stands out offensively. The peer seems to have written with his
coronet on, and his Earl's mantle before him; the commoner in his
elbow chair and undress.--What can be more pleasant than the way in
which the retired statesman peeps out in the essays, penned by the