so. Inquireth if you have had your arms done on vellum yet; and did
not know, till lately, that such-and-such had been the crest of the
family. His memory is unseasonable; his compliments perverse; his talk
a trouble; his stay pertinacious; and when he goeth away, you dismiss
his chair into a corner, as precipitately as possible, and feel fairly
rid of two nuisances.

There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is--a female Poor
Relation. You may do something with the other; you may pass him off
tolerably well; but your indigent she-relative is hopeless. "He is an
old humourist," you may say, "and affects to go threadbare. His
circumstances are better than folks would take them to be. You are
fond of having a Character at your table, and truly he is one." But in
the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman
dresses below herself from caprice. The truth must out without
shuffling, "She is plainly related to the L----s; or what does she at
their house?" She is, in all probability, your wife's cousin. Nine
times out of ten, at least, this is the case. Her garb is something
between a gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently
predominates. She is most provokingly humble, and ostentatiously
sensible to her inferiority. He may require to be repressed
sometimes--_aliquando suffiaminandus erat_--but there is no raising
her. You send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped--after the
gentlemen. Mr. ---- requests the honour of taking wine with her; she
hesitates between Port and Madeira, and choses the former--because he
does. She calls the servant _Sir_; and insists on not troubling him to
hold her plate. The housekeeper patronises her. The children's
governess takes upon her to correct her, when she has mistaken the
piano for harpsichord.

Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a noticeable instance of the
disadvantages, to which this chimerical notion of _affinity
constituting a claim to an acquaintance_, may subject the spirit of a
gentleman. A little foolish blood is all that is betwixt him and a
lady with a great estate. His stars are perpetually crossed by the
malignant maternity of an old woman, who persists in calling him "her
son Dick." But she has wherewithal in the end to recompense his
indignities, and float him again upon the brilliant surface, under
which it had been her seeming business and pleasure all along to sink
him. All men, besides, are not of Dick's temperament. I kn