(unless they fancied themselves Romeo and Juliet) to meet under such difficult circumstances? Simply this—that Mr. Mule could not be brought to look upon Mr. Lawler with exactly the same eyes as his niece; and, therefore, did not encourage his visits by day. And why so? every body else thought him a most amiable person. True. But Mr. Mule had taken an early dislike to him; and Mr. Mule was an obstinate man. In fact, this pique against the cornet dated from the day of that young gentleman’s birth; for exactly on that day it was that Mr. Ferdinand Lawler opened his long battery of annoyances against the worthy gentleman with his infantine crying; the Lawlers happening to occupy the adjoining house. This offence, however, on the part of Mr. Ferdinand ceased in his seventh year; and even a Mule might have been brought in the course of our generation to overlook it. But, precisely as this nuisance ceased, another nuisance, incident to the frail state of boy, viz., orchard-robbing, commenced; and, being naturally of an ambitious turn, Mr. Ferdinand did not confine his attacks to orchards, but waged unrelenting war with Mr. Mule’s grapes and peaches. Even this, however, might have been palliated by a steady course of contrition and penitence; for, after all, boys are boys, and grapes are grapes. But the climax of Mr. Ferdinand’s atrocities was yet to come: nemo repenti fuit turpissimus; and it was not until his ninth year that Mr. Ferdinand perpetrated that act, which, as Mr. Mule insisted, left no room for any rational hopes of reformation.—Mr. Mule had a certain Pomeranian dog, called Juba, universally admired for the brilliant whiteness of his coat. In those days people did not talk so much of taste and virtu as at present; nevertheless Mr. Ferdinand had his private opinions and his favourite theories on such topics. The whiteness of Juba he conceived to be rather the basis of a future excellence, than any actual or existing excellence. As a work of nature, Juba was very well; but he had yet to receive his last polish from the hand of art. His white coat was, in fact, Mr. Locke’s sheet of white paper, a pure carte blanche, on which Mr. Ferdinand felt it his duty to inscribe certain brilliant ideas which he had bought of a house painter. Seducing poor Juba, therefore, by means of a bone, into his own bed-room, he there painted him in oils. In his father’s library he had often been shewn fine missals, and early-printed books, in which the initial capitals of chapters, or other divisions, had been purposely omitted by the printer and afterwards supplied by a splendid device in colours—technically called an “illumination;” and such books or MSS. were said to be “illuminated.” Sometimes it happened, as he knew, that the spaces left for the illuminated letter were never filled up. This was universally held to be a defect in a book: why not in a dog? Nature undoubtedly had meant
