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HABITS, TASTES, AND AMUSEMENTS.

Habits may be considered weaknesses with the old man, or irregularities with the man of ripe age, but with the young man they are ever defects.

A grimace which is often repeated seldom fails to become a habit, and habits eventually degenerate into manias. Habits and manias, then, may be considered rather as diseases, or infirmities, than peculiar and ridiculous symptoms of different minds or characters. As maladies generally demand sympathy, and not censure, we should have avoided touching upon this class if some examples were not decidedly within the bounds of the ridiculous.

That, for instance, of an old man puffing and blowing after young girls to do the gallant, when he is old enough to be their grandfather.

That of not being able to eat when the place one usually occupies at table is taken by another.

That of not being able to sleep in any other bed but one's own, which makes travelling a very serious and difficult affair.

That of never being able to take a nap except when reading one's newspaper; a habit that is not very complimentary to the editor.

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Dancing is a taste with some, an amusement with others, but with all 't is cared for less of itself, than from its being frequently the means of which love and its delights are the end and aim.

Who can have failed remarking its ridiculous effects upon certain victims of avowed passions or secret

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flames? upon the faded beau, inharmoniously shaking to and fro his ill-shapen spindle-shanks? and upon the slim and dowdy old maids, who give themselves up so devotedly to the amorous gymnastics, otherwise called waltz, gallopade, quadrille, and contre-danse?

Good cheer is the pleasure of wits and the passion of fools, which stimulates and sharpens the one while it besots and brutalizes the other. The man of mind never descends to gluttony; he remains at least a gourmand; whilst the fool is but a gourmand at the utmost, and never can become (what the wit frequently is) an epicure.

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Good cheer, however, does not exclusively belong to wits and fools-Heaven forbid that it should! 't is relished by the tradesman, who delights in a frugal Sunday treat, equally as much as by the peer who

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nightly dines off its luxuries. It has charms for both sexes, but evidently the most for the lords of the creation, it being customary for the ladies to leave the table first, and the gentlemen afterwards.

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Of its fanatics,

Fishing, like all other pleasures, has its fanatics, its confessors, and its martyrs. the most ardent is the persevering immoveable angler; that species of human pilot stuck in the sand or the slime, and exhausting his intellect in struggling against the cunning of the gudgeon, or the artifice of the carp. Look, reader, at our worthy friend! and say, would not Swift have revoked his definition of

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the tribe, could he have seen the ingenuity displayed by so admirable an application of tinkling sounds to remedy shortness of sight-a defect arising from indefatigably watching the float some two score years?

Amongst its confessors are those anglers thoroughly-inured (to rheumatism), who, fixed in an arm-chair, still delight to cast their line amongst gold fish in a tub. As to its martyrs, they are sufficiently numerous, and include such luckless wights that a slip of the foot sends to sup with the Naiades; or whom the tow-rope of some boat throws in a somerset, to provide a supper-not for the gods, but for the little fishes. In Play it may be laid down as a rule, that the spectator who frequently desires to bet upon the game is more of a player than he believes, for the lurking passion only awaits a gain or a loss to burst forth.

He who cannot lose without losing his temper; he that exclaims against his misfortune; he who jeers the loser, who disputes the tricks, contests the points, and is continually quoting the rules, or appealing to the lookers on all these may be considered as possessing mean, vulgar, contemptible minds.

Those who play with turned-up cuffs, who wet their thumbs when dealing, who accompany every card they throw down by a thump upon the table, and sort their "hands" in their laps, are tap-room gamesters, ever on the watch for unwary bumpkins, but who sometimes find one that's "Yorkshire too!"

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Dominoes is a game so completely out of date, that when one meets two quiet old gentlemen intently peering through their spectacles at the curious fragments of osseous substance, one is inclined to

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