count and recount every treasure I have flung away, every bubble I have broken; I love to dream again the dreams of my boyhood, and to see the visions of departed pleasures flitting like Ossian's ghosts around me, "with stars dim twinkling through their forms." I look back with delight to a youth which has been idled away, to tastes which have been perverted, to talents which have been misemployed; and while in imagination I wander back through the haunts of my old idlesse, for all the learning of a Greek professor, for all the morality of Sir John Sewell, I would not lose one single point of that which has been ridiculous and grotesque, nor one single tint of that which has been beautiful and beloved.

Moralists and misanthropists, maidens with starched morals and matrons with starched frills, ancient adorers of bohea and scandal, venerable votaries of whispering and of whist, learned professors of the compassionate sneer and the innocent inuendo, eternal pillars of gravity and good order, of stupidity and decorum, come not near me with your spare and spectacled features, your candid and considerate criticism. In you I have no hope, in me you have no interest. I am to speak of stories you will not believe, of beings you cannot love; of foibles for which you have no compassion, of feelings in which you have no share.

Fortunate and unfortunate couples, belles in silks and beaux in sentimentals, ye who have wept and sighed, ye who have been wept for and sighed for, victims of vapours and coiners of vows, makers and marrers of intrigue, readers and writers of songs, come to me with your attention and your salts, your sympathy and your cambric; your griefs, your raptures, your anxieties, all have been mine; I know your blushing and your paleness, your self-deceiving and your selftormenting,

"so com'è inconstanta e vaga
Timida, ardita vita degli amanti,
Ch'un poco dolce molto amaro appoggia;
E so i costumi, e i lor sospiri, e i canti
El parlar rotto, e'l subito silenzio,
El brevissimo riso, e i lunghi pianti;

E qual è 'l mel temprato con l'assenzio."

All these things are so beautiful in Italian! but I need not have borrowed a syllable from Petrarch, for shapes of shadowy beauty, smiles of cherished loveliness, glances of reviving lustre, are coming in the mist of memory around me! I am writing an ower true tale!'

I never fell seriously in love till I was seventeen. Long before that period I had learned to talk nonsense and tell lies, and had established the important points that a delicate figure

.

is equivalent to a thousand pounds, a pretty mouth better than the bank of England, and a pair of bright eyes worth all Mexico. But at seventeen a more intricate branch of study awaited me.

I was lounging away my June at a pretty village in Kent, with little occupation beyond my own meditations, and no company but my horse and dogs. My sisters were both in the south of France; and my uncle, at whose seat I had pitched my camp, was attending to the interests of his constituents and the wishes of his patron in Parliament. I began after the lapse of a week to be immensely bored; I felt a considerable dislike of an agricultural life, and an incipient inclination for laudanum. I took to playing backgammon with the rector. He was more than a match for me, and used to grow most unclerically hot when the dice, as was their duty, befriended the weaker side. At last, at the conclusion of a very long hit, which had kept Mrs. Penn's tea waiting full an hour, my worthy and wigged friend flung deuce-ace three times in succession, put the board in the fire, overturned Mrs. Penn's best china, and hurried to his study to compose a sermon on patience.

Then I took up reading. My uncle had a delightful library where a reasonable man might have lived and died. But I confess I never could endure a long hour of lonely reading. It is a very pretty thing to take down a volume of Tasso or Racine, and study accent and cadence for the benefit of half a dozen listening belles, all dividing their attention between the work and the work-basket, their feelings and their flounces, their tears and their trimmings, with becoming and laudable perseverance. It is a far prettier thing to read Petrarch or Rousseau with a single companion, in some sheltered spot so full of passion and of beauty that you may sit whole days in its fragrance and dream of Laura and Julie. If these are out of the way, it is endurable to be tied down to the moth-eaten marvels of antiquity, poring to-day that you may pore again to-morrow, and labouring for the nine days' wonder of some, temporary distinction, with an ambition which is almost frenzy, and an emulation which speaks the language of animosity. But to sit down to a novel or a philosopher, with no companion to participate in the enjoyment and no object to reward the toil, this indeed-oh! I never could endure a long hour of lonely reading; and so I deserted Sir Roger's library, and left his Marmontel and his Aristotle to the slumbers from which I had unthinkingly awakened them.

At last I was roused from a state of most Persian torpor by a note from an old lady, whose hall, for so an indifferent country-house was by courtesy denominated, stood at the distance

of a few miles. She was about to give a ball. Such a thing had not been seen for ten years within ten miles of us. From the sensation produced by the intimation you might have deemed the world at an end. Prayers and entreaties were offered up to all the guardians and all the milliners; and the old gentlemen rose in a passion, and the old lace rose in price. Everything was everywhere in a flurry; kitchen, and parlour, and boudoir, and garret,-Babel all! Ackermann's Fashionable Repository, the Ladies' Magazine, the New Pocket-book, all these, and all other publications whose frontispieces presented the fashions for 1817,' personified in a thin lady with kid gloves and a formidable obliquity of vision, were in earnest and immediate requisition. Needles and pins were flying right and left; dinner was ill drest that dancers might be well dressed; mutton was marred that misses might be married. There was not a schoolboy who did not cut Homer and capers; nor a boarding-school beauty who did not try on a score of dancing shoes, and talk for a fortnight of Angiolini. Every occupation was laid down, every carpet was taken up; every combination of hands-a-cross and down the middle was committed most laudably to memory; and nothing was talked, nothing was meditated, nothing was dreamed, but love and romance, fiddles and flirtation, warm negus and handsome partners, dyed feathers and chalked floors.

In all the pride and condescension of an inmate of Grosvenor Square, I looked upon Lady Motley's At Home.' "Yes,' I said, flinging away 'the card with a tragedy twist of the fingers, yes: I will be there. For one evening I will encounter the tedium and the taste of a village ball. For one evening I will doom myself to figures that are out of date, and fiddles that are out of tune; dowagers who make embroidery by wholesale, and demoiselles who make conquests by profession for one evening I will endure the inquiries about Almack's and St. Paul's, the tales of the weddings that have been and the weddings that are to be, the round of curtsies in the ball-room and the round of beef at the supper-table: for one evening I will not complain of the everlasting hostess and the everlasting Boulanger, of the double duty and the double bass, of the great heiress, and the great plum-pudding; "Come one, come all,

Come dance in Sir Roger's great Hall."

And thus, by dint of civility, indolence, quotation, and antithesis, I bent up each corporal agent to the terrible feat, and would have the honour of waiting upon her ladyship,'in due form.

I went: turned my uncle's one-horse chaise into the long old avenue about an hour, after the time specified, and per

ceived by the lights flashing from all the windows, and the crash of chairs and carriages returning from the door, that the room was most punctually full, and the performers most pastorally impatient. The first face I encountered on my entrance was that of my old friend Villars; I was delighted to meet him, and expressed my astonishment at finding him in a situation for which his inclination, one would have supposed, was so little adapted.

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"By Mercury," he exclaimed, "I am metamorphosed, fairly metamorphosed, my good Vyvyan; I have been detained here three months by a fall from Sir Peter, and have amused myself most indefatigably by humming tunes and reading newspapers, winding silk, and guessing conundrums. I have made myself the admiration, the adoration, the very worship of all the coteries in the place; am reckoned very clever at cross purposes, and very apt at what's my thought like ?' The 'squires have discovered I can carve, and the matrons hold me indispensable at loo. Come! I am of little service to-night, but my popularity may be of use to you: you don't know a soul!-I thought so;-read it in your face the moment you came in,-never saw such a -there, Vyvyan, look there! I will introduce you." And so saying my companion half limped, half danced with me up to Miss Amelia Mesnil, and presented me in due form.

When I look back to any particular scene of my existence, I can never keep the stage clear of second-rate characters. Í never think of Mr. Kean's Othello without an intrusive reflection upon the subject of Mr. Cooper's Cassio; I never call to mind a gorgeous scattering forth of roses from Mr. Canning, without a painful idea of some cotemporary effusion of poppies from Mr. Hume. And thus, beautiful Margaret, it is in vain that I endeavour to separate your fascination from the group which was collected around you. Perhaps that dominion, which at this moment I feel almost revived, recurs more vividly to my imagination, when the forms and figures of all by whom it was contested are associated in its renewal.

First comes Amelia the magnificent, the acknowledged belle of the county, very stiff and very dumb in her unheeded and uncontested supremacy; and next, the most black-browed of foxhunters, Augusta, enumerating the names of her father's stud, and dancing as if she imitated them; and then the most accomplished Jane, vowing that for the last month she had endured immense ennui, that she thinks Lady Olivia prodigiously fade, that her cousin Sophy is quite brillante to-night, and that Mr. Peters plays the violin à merveille.

"I am bored, my dear Villars,-positively bored! the light is bad and the music abominable; there is no spring in the

boards and less in the conversation; it is a lovely moonlight night, and there is nothing worth looking at in the room."

I shook hands with my friend, bowed to three or four people, and was moving off. As I passed to the door I met two ladies in conversation; "Don't you dance any more, Margaret ?" said one. "Oh no," replied the other, "I am bored, my dear Louisa,-positively bored; the light is bad and the music abominable; there is no spring in the boards and less in the conversation; it is a lovely moonlight night, and there is nothing worth looking at in the room."

I never was distanced in a jest. I put on the look of a ten years' acquaintance and commenced parley. Surely you are not going away yet; you have not danced with me, Margaret; it is impossible you can be so cruel!" The lady behaved with wonderful intrepidity. "She would allow me the honour,but I was very late ;-really I had not deserved it ;"-and so we stood up together.

"Are you not very impertinent?”

66

Very; but you are very handsome.

Nay you are not to be angry; it was a fair challenge, and fairly received."

“And you will not even ask my pardon?"

"No! it is out of my way! I never do those things; it would embarrass me beyond measure. Pray let us accomplish an introduction: not altogether an usual one; but that matters little. Vyvyan Joyeuse-rather impertinent, and very fortunate at your service."

66 Margaret Orleans,-very handsome, and rather foolish,— at your service!"

Margaret danced like an angel. I knew she would. I could not conceive by what blindness I had passed four hours without being struck. We talked of all things that are, and a few beside. She was something of a botanist, so we began with flowers; a digression upon China roses carried us to China—the Mandarins with little brains, and the ladies with little feet-the Emperor-the Orphan of China-Voltaire-Zayrecriticism-Dr. Johnson-the great bear-the system of Copernicus-stars-ribbons-garters-the Order of the Bath-Sea bathing-Dawlish-Sidmouth-Lord Sidmouth-Cicero

Rome Italy-Alfieri-Metastasio-fountains-groves-gardens-and so, as the dancing concluded, we contrived to end as we began, with Margaret Orleans and botany.

Margaret talked well on all subjects and wittily on many. I had expected to find nothing but a romping girl, somewhat amusing, and very vain. But I was out of my latitude in the first five minutes, and out of my senses in the next. She left the room very early, and I drove home, more astonished than I had been for many years.