e can no more see his own folly than he can see
his own ears. And the great quality of Dulness is to be unalterably
contented with itself. What myriads of souls are there of this admirable
sort,--selfish, stingy, ignorant, passionate, brutal; bad sons, mothers,
fathers, never known to do kind actions!

To pause, however, in this disquisition, which was carrying us far off
Kingstown, New Molloyville, Ireland--nay, into the wide world wherever
Dulness inhabits--let it be stated that Mrs. Haggarty, from my brief
acquaintance with her and her mother, was of the order of persons just
mentioned. There was an air of conscious merit about her, very hard to
swallow along with the infamous dinner poor Dennis managed, after
much delay, to get on the table. She did not fail to invite me to
Molloyville, where she said her cousin would be charmed to see me; and
she told me almost as many anecdotes about that place as her mother used
to impart in former days. I observed, moreover, that Dennis cut her
the favourite pieces of the beefsteak, that she ate thereof with great
gusto, and that she drank with similar eagerness of the various strong
liquors at table. "We Irish ladies are all fond of a leetle glass of
punch," she said, with a playful air, and Dennis mixed her a powerful
tumbler of such violent grog as I myself could swallow only with some
difficulty. She talked of her suffering a great deal, of her sacrifices,
of the luxuries to which she had been accustomed before marriage,--in
a word, of a hundred of those themes on which some ladies are in the
custom of enlarging when they wish to plague some husbands.

But honest Dennis, far from being angry at this perpetual, wearisome,
impudent recurrence to her own superiority, rather encouraged the
conversation than otherwise. It pleased him to hear his wife discourse
about her merits and family splendours. He was so thoroughly beaten
down and henpecked, that he, as it were, gloried in his servitude, and
fancied that his wife's magnificence reflected credit on himself. He
looked towards me, who was half sick of the woman and her egotism, as
if expecting me to exhibit the deepest sympathy, and flung me glances
across the table as much as to say, "What a gifted creature my Jemima
is, and what a fine fellow I am to be in possession of her!" When the
children came down she scolded them, of course, and dismissed them
abruptly (for which circumstance, perhaps, the writer of these pages
was no