"What do you think of the cool, deliberate baseness of his conduct and his letter?" resumed Cecile, and without waiting for my answer, continued her story as follows:

"I did not hear any thing of this precious composition for many months after; for as soon as the Curate read the words, He was married this morning,' I fainted, and on my recovery from that state it was discovered that I had completely lost my senses. A violent brain fever was the consequence of my agitation, and thrice was I on the brink of the grave: in spite of all the skill of my medical attendants, united with the soothing care of my mother and sister, I did not begin to recover my recollection till half a year was over, and then it was by such slow degrees, that they were more terrified than consoled by my discourse. In short, a full twelvemonth had elapsed before I was inyself again; but I did at length recover my memory as clear as ever it had been, and with a mind so changed, that, in place of an unbounded affection for Henry De Cassales, my heart was occupied by an utter abhorrence of all his sex, so fervent, that I made a vow never to look upon a man again; and, however strange it may appear, I have contrived to keep that vow unbroken amidst all the changes, difficulties, and dangers in which we have found ourselves. My good looks, as well as my health of body, had vanished, but my peace of mind was restored, and except for a few days in the year, I was cheerful and contented; but it was long before I could pass the anniversary of my sudden shock without a return of my mental disease, and the indulgence of my sister, who gratified my whim of this temporary mourning, was the chief cause of its diminution. By degrees the attack became less violent, and of shorter duration; after eight years it ceased entirely, and never shall I forget the joy of my poor Rose the first time that I passed this day in my perfect senses. One of the things which

afforded me most pleasure during my malady, was the sight of flowers, and that was the origin of the flower-garden on the terrace. My goldfinch, too, which I used to play with when I did not recognise any human creature, suggested to my kind sister the project of our little aviary. I was led out upon the terrace when my mind and body were still weak, and have reason to believe that this amusement contributed much to my recovery. The only thing which ever recalled an idea of the love I had once borne to that unworthy man, was the agitation produced in me by the first sight of his portrait, which the servant, to whom Rose gave orders for its removal, had forgotten. I insisted on having it placed here, because I thought it would be a cowardly act to send it away; but to avoid the pain of beholding those features which I now see with indifference, I had it covered. Poor creature! his course was soon run, and he has been long forgotten by the distant relations to whom the remnant of his great riches devolved.

"The last slight attack of my mental malady occurred on the death of my dear mother, for though her decay was so gradual that she expired like an extinguishing lamp, yet the shock of finding her dead was more than I could support. Since that period I have been tolerably tranquil, though, in regard to bodily health, always a martyr to past sufferings; and Rose and I are so accustomed to our monotonous course of life, that it constitutes our happiness. Weeks after weeks, and months after months, pass as you see, and I often think that we should never have enjoyed half so much felicity in the turmoil of the world as our solitary habits bestow on us."

Such was the Old Maid's Story. Nothing worth relating passed during the remaining time of my abode at the Castle of Varesne, to which I bade adieu at the end of October, and pursued my lonely journey southward.

DEAR NORTH, You have tried various ways of making yourself popular, and strange though it may appear, you have suc ceeded in them all. In Oxford, in particular, you are a text-book upon all occasions. In your original articles, you have been gay and witty, in such an uncontrollabledegree, that the whole human race seemed to aim at nothing so much as to exert the privilege of laughter; and several Dons of Colleges have endeavoured (not, we understand, without some glimmerings of success), by assuming a portentous grin, and cackling over your papers, to persuade the under-graduates that they had the same feelings with the rest of the world. High-street generally wears the most brilliant and animated appearance about the third day after you have left the press. Sleepyeyed individuals, who pore with the same leaden goggles over the gaieties of Terence and Aristophanes, as over Macculloch and Jeremy Bentham, brighten up in a miraculous manner when they have perused a scene in old Maga; and some of them, though they afterwards have the misfortune to take first classes, appear, while under her inspiration, to be sensible and even lively young men. Golding's and Jabber's, about the beginning of a month, teem with merry-faced and light-hearted commoners; senior ta bles seem more talkative and entertaining, and common-rooms are absolutely uproarious beneath the potent spell of your midriff-shaking pen. When you are tired of raising laughter, in pity to senior fellows, tutors, and heads of houses, to whom the exertion of gaffawing might prove dangerous, or at all events, fatiguing, you alter the strain of your meditations, and turn sentimental for a time. This, though it puts all the rest of the world in tears, is perfect repose to them. Unblanched is the ruddy cheek of the Fellow-unmoistened the large distended eye of the Master; and just where the catastrophe grows most touchingly pathetic, the unwieldy animal flaps his huge head upon his dexter shoulder, and assures the neigh bourhood, by the magnificence of his snore, that not only his lungs are sound, but that his appetite, previous to his dinner, was tolerably good. It

is astonishing, by the bye, with what certainty one can guess the amount of a man's preferment, from the nature and sound of his snore. Nothing can be more different than the loud, open, long-drawn alarum of a Warden, from the weak, short, sneaking sort of a snivel which issues from the blue, ema ciated proboscis of a Junior Fellow. With what a proud, trumpet-like sound does the one echo round the oaken walls, shaking the long-stalked glasses on the table, and finally dying away like a peal of far off thunder, which the tra veller hears reverberated from rock to rock in the tremendous solitudes of Ben Nevis, while between the pauses the mountain seems to listen in breath. less awe, as if the next vast and overwhelming roar were to shake it to its solid and everlasting foundations. How often in senior common-rooms may be marked the gradual dropping asleep of the learned and venerable members! First, after a few rounds of the bottle, the tongues, which are tired of eulogizing or vituperating the various dishes which had smoked upon the board, gradually begin to be still,

soon conversation comes absolutely to a stand,-the candles grow alarmingly long in the wick,-comparative darkness involves the sage assembly,-and first one, then another, drops off into a placid and harmonious repose. Then what dreams float before the eyes of their imagination! Blue silk pelisses jostling shovel hats, church spires dancing in most admired disorder, fat incumbents falling down in a fit, neat clerical-looking gigs standing at vicarage doors, and these all incongruously commingled with white veils, lawn sleeves, roast beef, pulpit cushions, bright eyes, and small black sarsnet shoes. Suddenly the chapel bell dissolves the fleeting fabric of the vision; and, behold! the white veil is a poet's imagination, the church spire is still at a miserable distance, the vicarage is a Utopian nonentity, and the fat incumbent, in a state of the ruddiest health, is the only reality of the dream! It is useless to tell how you are received by the Under-graduates,-suffice it to say, there would be a great addition to the number of first classes if Blackwood were one of the books in the school. Passages in

the classics, though dark and intricate as those of Christ-church cloisters, would be clear as noon-day. Exami ners would be the most jocund and fascinating of men, and Dodd, robbed of his terrors, and pluckless as a tailor's goose, would have little to do but to distribute testamurs to any one that applied. But this, in the present state of ignorance and intellect-for the terms are nearly synonymous-is hardly to be expected; and men must still linger out their three years, before they can strut about in the dignity of wide sleeves, "like Troy's proud dames, whose garments sweep the ground."

But hold! Did we, indeed, say linger? They fly, they gallop-it is only after these three years are past, that Time gets galled and spavined, and all the kicking and spurring you can give him, only makes him limp, and hobble, and creep the slower. How delight ful they seem even at the time! and to us, who are old and far away from "the palaces and towers," their recollection is connected with the best and happiest time of our life. Often and often, at the close of a long and busy day, do we sit and dream in our elbow chair; and there, in our lonely parlour, our solitude is peopled with the jocund faces that gathered round us long ago the light laugh sounds in our ears, and tones of the voices we used to love to listen to, thrill upon our hearts with a distinctness which, at the interval of so many years, is startling and almost awful. Looks

we can recall, and scenes, in which those who were the actors shall never be assembled again. Some have gone down into the grave, and, except at moments of rare occurrence, when the memory rests upon them by chance, are as completely forgotten as if they had never existed, nor laughed with us, nor drank with us, nor rode with us, nor looked forward to happy years, and meetings, and intimacy in our old age. And some are gone off to India, and one Long Tom,-poh! we are growing sentimental-the dearest and most intimate of our friends-the last time we heard of him, stood a great chance of being transported on a charge of having three wives! This we could not have expected, and it pained us very much. Bigamy may, perhaps, be excused in such people as coachmen of long stages, commercial bagmen, and circuit-going barristers,

more especially, if the prior wife be a deserving and amiable woman; but trigamy is too awful a tempting of Providence, and doubtless, like many other iniquities, is its own severest punishment.

College! how different from school! Never believe a great, broad-faced, beetle-browed Spoon, when he tells you, with a sigh that would upset a schooner, that the happiest days of a man's life are those he spends at school. Does he forget the small bed-room occupied by eighteen boys, the pump you had to run to on Sunday mornings, when decency and the usher commanded you to wash? Is he oblivious of the blue chalk and water they flooded your bowels with at breakfast, and called it milk? Has he lost the remembrance of the Yorkshire pudding, vulgarly called choke-dog, of which you were obliged to eat a pound before you were allowed a slice of beef, and of which, if you swallowed half that quantity, you thought cooks and oxen mere works of supererogation, and totally useless on the face of the earth? Has the fool lost all recollection of the prayers in yon cold, wet, clay-floored cellar, proudly denominated the Chapel? has he forgot the cuffs from the senior boys, the pinches from the second master? and, in fine, has he forgot the press at the end of the school-room, where a cart-load of birch was deposited at the beginning of every half year, and not a twig left to tickle a mouse with, long before the end of it? He talks of freedom from carewhat a negative kind of happiness! Let him cut off his hand, he will never hurt his nails. Let him enclose an order for all his money even unto us, and no more will he be troubled with cares about the Stocks-no more will he be teased with calculations on the price of grain. All that raving about school-boys, is perfect nonsense-it is. the most miserable period of a human being's life. Poor, shivering, trembling, kicked, buffetted, thumped, and starved little mortals! We never see a large school but we feel inclined to shoot them all, masters, ushers, and door-keepers included, merely to put them out of pain.

But at College, how different! There, a man begins to feel that it is a matter of total indifference to him whether he sit on a hard wooden bench, or a soft stuffed chair; there,

the short coat is discarded, and he stalks about with the air of a threetailed Bashaw, as his own two, gene rally, at first, are prolonged a little below the knee; there, his penny tart, which he bought on Saturdays at the door of the school, is exchanged for a dessert from Golding's; his beer, which he occasionally imbibed at the little pot-house, two miles beyond the school bounds, is exchanged for his wine from Butler's. Books from Talboy's, the most enterprising of Bibliopoles, supply the place of the tatter ed Dictionary he brought to the University, which, after being stolen when new, and passing, by the same process, through twenty hands, is at last, when fluttering in its last leaves, restolen by the original proprietor, who fancies he has made a very profitable "nibble." The trot he used to enjoy by stealth on the butcher's broken kneed pony, is succeeded now by a gallop on a steed of Quartermain's; and he is delighted to find that horse and owner strive which shall be the softest-mouthed and gentlest charger. The dandy mare, we suppose, has many long years ago made fat the great-grandfathers of the present race of dogs; and old Scroggins, we imagine, has been trod to pieces in boots and shoes, the very memory of which departed long, long before they were paid for. Of old Scroggins-as Dr Johnson says and of his virtues, let us indulge ourself in the recollection. Though not formed in the finest mould, or endowed with the extremity of swiftness, his pace was sure and steadyequal to Hannibal in endurance of fatigue; and, like that celebrated commander, his aspect was rendered peculiarly fierce and striking by a blemish in his eye; not ignorant of the way to Woodstock was the wall-eyed veteran; not unacquainted with the covers at Ditchley; not unaccustomed to the walls at Hethrop: but Dan dy and Scroggins have padded the hoof from this terrestrial and unstable world -peace to their manes!

Who doesn't recollect the minutest particular of his first visit to Oxford, when he went up to be matriculated? The first view we had of the University shall live in our heart for ever. It was a bright moonlight night in winter. In coming in by the Lower London Road, we saw the river gliding noiselessly round the city, with

numberless lights glancing upon its breast from the barges up towards the bridge. The huge tower of Christ Church seemed "steeped in the calm moonshine," and rose in silent beauty above that voiceless and sleeping city, like a knight of old guarding the couch of his slumbering lady. The spires and towers rising on every side in calm and beautiful array, and hallowed to every young heart by their association with all that is sacred in learning and piety, seemed more like the creation of a dream, than any sober reality; and it was with unmingled: feelings of awe and veneration, that we drank our first glass of brandy and water in the Angel; and deep were our cogitations, and aspiring and virtuous our resolves, as we pulled on our night-cap for the first time in Oxford, and dreamt that we were Vice Chancellor, and wore a wig. We remember with what awe we made our bow to the Vice for the time beingwhat wisdom we saw in his robeswhat condescension in bidding us sit down; and truly, if we forget his kindness to us afterwards, and in more. material matters than pointing us to a chair, we shall deserve to see nobody for two years but our old aunt Hannah, who is positively pleased with nothing-not even with herself. But, as a celebrated divine took an opportunity of mentioning to her lately, when ladies get on the exterior side of sixty, they are gradually more difficult to please, as after that time they begin to grow fast hideous.

The few months between matriculation and residence pass off like a dream. School we entirely forget; the memory. of Horace becomes dim and indistinct; and visions of the University, and all that we saw in our brief and wonderstruck visit, dance before our imagination till we sigh for our first term, that we may enter into the promised land, of which we had such a captivating prospect. At last the wishedfor moment comes. We are whirled along the road ten miles an hour, filled with ideas of the dignity of a member of the University, and resolved to support it, by as great a shew of grandeur and manliness as we can assume. At every town, as we draw nearer Oxford, we pick up some "men" dressed generally all in the same way; hands stuck consequen tially into the pockets of their upper

Benjamins, and probably a cigar in their mouth, and a servant standing behind them with a portmanteau and carpet bag. Up climbs the stately alumnus; round him he looks with the majesty of Glumdalea, sits down without saying a syllable, and puffs his cigar and holds his tongue with astonishing perseverance. The two fat men in brown great-coats, and the woman with the cotton umbrella, get down at the next market-town, and, a few miles beyond, their place is occupied by three more under-graduates -so that now there is no one on the coach but members of the University, and that red-whiskered Irish packman, who, after sundry attempts to involve his opposite neighbour in conversation, gives it up in hopeless despair, and begins to suspect that this is an universal emigration of Mr Kinniburgh's deaf and dumb institution. At dinner it is quite the same,-no one with courage to break through the ridiculous etiquette, which prevents men from speaking unless they be introduced; as if the ordinary civilities to each other of fellow-travellers involved the necessity of an acquaintance, on their arriving at their destination. Even on our first journey, we made a point of being tied down by no such rules, but spoke to our neighbours on the coach as we should have done to any other people if they had been in the same situation. It is wonderful how much information an accurate observer may pick up upon these occasions. We discovered, for instance, by this means, when we had been resident upwards of three years without finding it out, that there was a very respectable college of the name of Worcester somewhere out in the country, and that some of the members of it had been known to ride the whole distance into Oxford without changing horses, or even stopping to bait. We likewise heard of two men of one of the Halls who were not in the slightest danger of being plucked. But the accounts one hears on a coach generally require to be authenticated; more particularly, as the gentleman from whom we received this information, was much more famed, as we afterwards understood, for his imagination than his veracity.

We shall suppose ourselves fairly arrived at last. In due form we have taken possession of our rooms, and dis

covered in the first five minutes that our scout is a thief and pickpocket. But elate with the rustling of our new gown, we carefully place our glossy, tasselled cap upon the table, and lie luxuriously upon our sofa, wrapt in high visions of future glory. Vain the attempt to describe the civility of tradesmen, useless to mention their thanks for the honour of our commands, and impossible to relate the approving complacency with which we feel ourselves," aye, every inch, a man!" No longer in fear of our ears becoming rubicund from the horny thumbs of the Welsh assistant, no longer called Jack, or Tom, or Dick, but dignified with "Mr" by all the tutors, and having numberless notes lying on our table, directed to us Esq. from men whom, two months ago, we remember crying very heartily, and looking very sheepish, immediately after being flogged. But surely few pleasures are equal to that of meeting at College those with whom we have been intimate at school. The recollection of our mutual inconveniences gives a zest to our present more agreeable situation, till we attain a Coriolanus-like detestation of the name of "boy," and hunt, and drive tandems, and take lessons from Tom Cribb,and twenty other things equally foolish, and equally useless, "to give the world assurance of a man." But very soon the novelty of our freedom wears off; we feel, if we have a grain of sense in our composition, that these are not our proper pursuits and before we have quite forgotten the little learning we brought with us, we have come to a resolution to enlarge it.

We never saw the delights of what is called hard reading. We get up in a dark morning of winter, and the whole atmosphere feels as if the bedposts had been sawed off the North Pole. After, with shaking nerves, and teeth chattering like a pair of castanets, we have managed to poke our shivering limbs into our icy trow sers, which, by the way, from the absence of a candle, we generally slip into with the wrong side foremost; we find, on looking into our sitting-room, every thing exactly as we left it the night before," the rusty grate unconscious of a fire," and the very smoke frozen, in its paralized attempt to shudder its way up the chimney. With fear and trembling, we grope