Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations tet, extending beyond the period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable fort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash kings offspring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habit -- yet so, as "with a difference." We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are rather uood, than expressed; and once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and plaihat I was altered. We are both great readers in different dires. While I am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange poraries, she is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, whereof our on reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teazes me. I have little in the progress of events. She must have a story -- well, ill, or indifferently told -- so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil acts. The fluctuations of fortune in fi -- and almost in real life -- have ceased to i, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinion -- heads with some diverting twist in them -- the oddities of authorship please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of any thing that sounds odd or bizarre Nothing goes down with her, that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of on sympathy. She "holds Nature more clever." I pardon her blio the beautiful obliquities of the Religio Medici; but she must apologise to me for certain disrespectful insinuations, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, toug the intellectuals of a dear favourite of mine, of the last tury but one -- the thrioble, chaste, and virtuous, -- but again somewhat fantastical, and inal-braind, generous Margaret Newcastle.
It has bee of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have wished, to have had for her associates and mine, free-thinkers leaders, and disciples, of novel philosophies and systems; but she her wrangles with, nor accepts, their opinions. That which was good and venerable to her, when a child, retains its authority over her mind still. She never juggles or plays tricks with her uanding.
We are both of us ined to be a little too positive; and I have observed the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly this --- that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns out, that I was in the right, and my cousin in the wrong. But where we have differed upon moral points; upon something proper to be done, or let alone; whatever heat of opposition, or steadiness of vi, I set out with, I am sure always, in the long run, to be brought over to her way of thinking.
I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle hand, fet does not like to be told of her faults. She hath an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of reading in pany: at which times she will answer yes or no to a question, without fully uanding its purport -- which is provoking, and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said question. Her presenind is equal to the most pressing trials of life, but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. When the purpose requires it, and is a thing of moment, she speak to it greatly; but in m