But what was the despair, when he returned home, and would fain have given his old instructors a like serenade! Nine venerable sisters, their eyes in tears, their senses confused with horror, their veils two deep, condemned him in full conclave. The younger ones, who might have spoken for him, were not allowed to be present. One or two were for sending him back to the vessel; but the majority resolved upon keeping and chastising him. He was sentenced to two months' abstinence, three of imprisonment, and four of silence.

Covered with shame and instructed by misfortune, our hero at last found himself contrite. He forgot the dragoons and the monk, and once more in unison with the holy sisters both in matter and manner, became more devout than a canon. When they were sure of his conversion, the divan reassembled, and agreed to shorten the term of his penitence. Judge if the day of his deliverance was a day of joy! All his future moments, consecrated to gratitude, were to be spun by the hands of love and security. O faithless pleasure! O vain expectation of mortal delight! All the dormitories were dressed with flowers. Exquisite coffee, songs, lively exercise, an amiable tumult of pleasure, a plenary indulgence of liberty, all breathed of love and delight; nothing announced the coming adversity. But, O indiscreet liberality! O fatal overflowingness of the hearts of nuns! Passing too quickly from abstinence to abundance, from the hard bosom of misfortune to whole seas of sweetness, saturated with sugar and set on fire with liqueurs, Ver-Vert fell one day on a box of sweetmeats, and lay on his deathbed. His roses were all changed to cypress. In vain the sisters endeavoured to recall his fleeting spirit. The sweet excess had hastened his destiny, and the fortunate victim of love expired in the bosom of pleasure.

AN EVENING WITH POPE.

REPORTED BY A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO DINED WITH HIM. (The New Monthly Magazine, June 1825.)

July 4, 1727.

I dined with Mr. Pope.

YESTERDAY was a day of delight. The only persons present were the venerable lady his mother, Mrs. Martha Blount, and Mr. Walscott, a great Tory, but as great a lover of Dryden ; which Mr. Pope was pleased to inform me was the reason he had invited me to meet him. Mr. Pope was in black, with a tie-wig. I could not help regarding him, as he sat leaning in his armchair before dinner, in the light of a portrait for posterity. When he came into the room, after kindly making me welcome, he took some flowers out of a little basket that he had brought with him, and presented them, not to Mrs. Martha, who seemed to look as if she expected it, but to Mrs. Pope; which I thought very pretty and like a gentleman, not in the ordinary way. But the other had no reason to be displeased; for turning to her with the remainder, he said, "I was thinking of a compliment to pay you; so I have done it." He flatters with as much delicacy as Sir Richard Steele; and the ladies like it as much from him. What fine-shaped fellows have I seen, who could not call up half such looks into their eyes!

CRITICISM ON FEMALE BEAUTY.

(The New Monthly Magazine, July and August 1825.) CRITICISM, for the most part, is so partial, splenetic, and pedantic, and has such little right to speak of what it undertakes to censure, that the words "criticism on beauty" sound almost as ill as if a man were to announce something unpleasant upon something pleasant.

And certainly as criticism, according to its general practice, consists in an endeavour to set the art above its betters, and to render genius amenable to want of genius

(particularly in those matters which, by constituting the very essence of it, are the least felt by the men of line and rule), so critics are bound by their trade to object to the very pleasantest things. Delight, not being their business, "puts them out." The first reviewer was Momus, who found fault with the Goddess of Beauty.

We have sometimes fancied a review set up by this antidivinity in heaven. It would appear, by late discoveries in the history of the globe, that, as one species of production has become extinct, so new ones may have come into being. Now, imagine the gods occasionally putting forth some new work, which is criticized in the Olympian Review. Chloris, the Goddess of Flowers, for instance, makes a sweetbriar.

CRITICISM ON SWEETBRIAR.

"The Sweetbriar, a new bush, by Chloris, Goddess of Flowers. Rain and Sun, 4104.

"This is another hasty production of a lady, whom we are anxious to meet with a more satisfied face. Really, we must say, that she tires us. The other day we had the pink. It is not more than a year ago that she flamed upon us with the heartsease (pretty names these); then we were all to be sunk into a bed of luxury and red leaves by the rose and now, ecce iterum Rosina, comes a new edition of the same effeminate production, altered, but not amended, and made careless, confused, and full of harsh points. These the fair author, we suppose, takes for a dashing variety! Why does she not consult her friends? Why must we be forced to think that she mistakes her talents, and that she had better confine herself to the production of daisies and dandelions? Even the rose, which has been so much cried up in certain quarters, was not original. It was clearly suggested by that useful production of an orthodox friend of ours-the cabbage; which has occasioned it to be pretty generally called the cabbage-rose. The sweetbriar, therefore, is imitation upon imitation, crambe (literally) bis cocta [cabbage twice cooked], a thing not to be endured. To say the truth, which we wish to do with great tenderness, considering the author's sex, this sweetbriar-bush is but a rifacimento of the rose-bush. The only difference is, that everything is done on a pettier scale, the flowers hastily turned

out, and a superabundance of those startling points added, which so annoyed us in the rose yclept moss; for there is no end to these pretty creatures the roses. Let us see. There is the cabbage-rose, the moss-rose, the musk-rose, the damaskrose, the hundred-leaved-rose, the yellow-rose, and earth only knows how many more. Surely these were enough, in all conscience. Most of them rank little above extempore effusions, and were hardly worth the gathering; but after so much trifling, to go and alter the style of a commonplace in a spirit of mere undoing and embrouillement, and then palm it upon us for something free, forsooth, and original, is a desperate evidence of falling off! We cannot consent to take mere wildness for invention; a hasty and tangled piece of business, for a regular work of art. What is called Nature will never do. Nature is unnatural. The best production by far of the fair author was the auricula, one of those beautiful and regular pieces of composition, the right proportions of which are ascertained, and reducible to measurement. But tempora mutantur. Our fair florist has perhaps got into bad company. We have heard some talk about zephyrs, bees, wild birds, and such worshipful society. Cannot this ingenious person be content with the hot-house invented by Vulcan and Co., without gadding abroad in this disreputable manner? We have heard that she speaks with disrespect of ourselves; but we need not assure the reader that this can have no weight with an honest critic. By-theby, why this briar is called sweet, we must unaffectedly and most sincerely say, is beyond our perceptions."

We were about to give a specimen of another article, by the same reviewer, on the subject of our present paper:"Woman, being a Companion to Man," &c. But the tone of it would be intolerable. We shall therefore proceed with a more becoming and grateful criticism, such as the contemplation of the subject naturally produces.

A SITTING FROM FEMALE BEAUTY.

O Pygmalion, who can wonder (no artist surely) that thou didst fall in love with the work of thine own hands! O Titian! O Raphael! O Apelles! We could almost fancy this sheet of paper to be one of your tablets, our desk an easel, our pen a painting brush; so impossible does it seem

that the beauty we are about to paint should not inspire us with a gusto equal to your own!

Come, then, the colours and the ground prepare.

This inkstand is our palette. We handle our pen as if there were the richest bit of colour in the world at the end of it. The reds and whites look as if we could eat them. Look at that pearly tip at the end of the ear. The very shade of it has a glow. What a light on the forehead! What a moisture on the lip! What a soul, twenty fathom deep, in the eyes! Look at us, madam, if you please. The eye right on ours. The forehead a little more inclined. Good. What an expression! Raphael-it is clear to me that you have not the feeling we have: for you could paint such a portrait, and we cannot. We cannot paint after the life. Titian, how could you contrive it? Apelles, may we trouble you to explain yourself? It is lucky for the poets that their mistresses are not obliged to sit to them. They would never write a line. Even a prose-writer is baffled. How Raphael managed in the Palazzo Chigi-how Sacchini contrived, when he wrote his "Rinaldo and Armida," with Armida by his side is beyond our comprehension. We can call to mind, but we cannot copy. Fair presence, avaunt! We conjure you out of our study, as one of our brother-writers, in an agony of article, might hand away his bride, the printer having sent to him for copy.

A HEART ESSENTIAL TO BEAUTY.

Beauty itself is a very poor thing unless beautified by sentiment. The reader may take the confession as he pleases, either as an instance of abundance of sentiment on our part, or as an evidence of want of proper ardour and impartiality; but we cannot (and that is the plain truth) think the most beautiful creature beautiful, or be at all affected by her, or long to sit next her, or go to a theatre with her, or listen to a concert with her, or walk in a field or a forest with her, or call her by her Christian name, or ask her if she likes poetry, or tie (with any satisfaction) her gown for her, or be asked whether we admire her shoe, or take her arm even into a dining-room, or kiss her at Christmas, or on Aprilfool day, or on May day, or on any other day, or dream of