MY reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. Ihing that relates to sce, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or try gentlemen, in king Johns days. I know less geography than a school-boy of six weeks standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia; whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions; nor form the remotest jecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Diemens Land. Yet do I hold a correspondeh a very dear friend in the first-named of these two Terrae Initae. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear, or Charless Wain; the place of any star; or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness -- and if the sun on some portentous moro make his first appearan the West, I verily believe, that, while all the world were gasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and ology I possess some vague points, such as one ot help pig up in the course of miscellaneous study; but I never deliberately sat down to a icle, even of my own try. I have most dim apprehensions of the freat monarchies; and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fancy. I make the widest jectures i, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great painstaking, got me to think I uood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the sed. I am entirely unacquainted with the modern languages; and, like a better man than myself, have "small Latin and less Greek." I am a strao the shapes aure of the orees, herbs, flowers -- not from the circumstany being town-born -- for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it in "on Devons leafy shores," -- and am no less at a loss among purely town-objects, tools, engines, meic processes. -- Not that I affect ignorance -- but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious; and I have been obliged to fill it with such et curiosities as it hold without ag. I sometimes wonder, how I have passed my probation with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed pany; every body is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a tete-a-tete there is no shuffling. The truth will out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as the bei alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed man, that does not know me. I lately got into a dilemma of this sort. -
In one of my daily jaunts between Bishopsgate and Shacklewell, the coach stopped to take up a staid-lookileman, about the wrong side of thirty, who was giving his parting dires (while the steps were adjusting), in a tone of mild authority, to a tall youth, who seemed to be her his clerk, his son, nor his servant, but something partaking of all three. The youth was dismissed, and we drove on. As we were the sole passengers, he naturally enough addressed his versation to me; and we discussed the merits of the fare, the civility and punctuality of the driver; the circumstance of an opp