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has the effect of a seventy-four gun-ship in time of peace; for, while you assure yourself that there is no real danger, you cannot help thinking how tremendous would be her onset, if pugnaciously inclined, and how futile the effort to inflict any counter-injury. She certainly looks tenfold-nay, a hundred-fold-better able to take care of herself than our slender-framed and haggard womankind; but I have not found reason to suppose that the English dowager of fifty has actually greater courage, fortitude, and strength of character than our women of similar age, or even a tougher physical endurance than they. Morally, she is strong, I suspect, only in society, and in the common routine of social affairs, and would be found powerless and timid in any exceptional strait that might call for energy outside of the conventionalities amid. which she has grown up.

But

You can meet this figure in the street, and live, and even smile at the recollection. conceive of her in a ball-room, with the bare, brawny arms that she invariably displays there, and all the other corresponding development, such as is beautiful in the maiden blossom, but a spectacle to howl at in such an over-blown cabbage-rose as this.

Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk there must be hidden the modest, slender, violetnature of a girl, whom an alien mass of earthliness has unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden in her teens, though very seldom so pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded leaves, and tender womanhood, shielded by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or other, our American girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable moment. It is a pity that the English violet should grow into such an outrageously developed peony as I have attempted to describe. I wonder whether a middle-aged husband ought to be considered as legally married to all the accretions that have overgrown the slenderness of his bride, since he led her to the altar, and which make her so much more than he ever bargained for! Is it not a sounder view of the case, that the matrimonial bond. cannot be held to include the three fourths of the wife that had no existence when the ceremony was performed? And as a matter of conscience and good morals, ought not an English married pair to insist upon the celebration of a Silver Wedding at the end of

twenty-five years in order to legalize and mutually appropriate that corporeal growth of which both parties have individually come into possession since they were pronounced one flesh ?-Our Old Home.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW!

(BORN, 1807-DIED, 1882.)

A WRAITH IN THE MIST.

'Sir, I should build me a fortification, if I came to live here."-BOSWELL'S Johnson.

O

N the green little isle of Inchkenneth,
Who is it that walks by the shore,
So gay with his Highland blue bonnet,
So brave with his targe and claymore?

His form is the form of a giant,

But his face weårs an aspect of pain; Can this be the Laird of Inchkenneth? Can this be Sir Allan McLean?

Ah, no! It is only the Rambler,

The Idler, who lives in Bolt Court,

And who says, were he Laird of Inchkenneth, He would wall himself round with a fort.

-Birds of Passage.

1 See Biographical Sketch, p. xxix.

EDMUND QUINCY.'

(BORN, 1808-DIED, 1877.)

WHO PAID FOR THE PRIMA DONNA?

"IF

I.

F any thing could make a man forgive himself for being sixty years old," said the Consul, holding up his wineglass between his eye and the setting sun,-for it was summer-time," it would be that he can remember Malibran in her divine sixteenity at the Park Theatre, thirty odd years ago. Egad, sir, one could n't help making great allowances for Don Giovanni, after seeing her in Zerlina. She was beyond imagination piquante and delicious."

The Consul, as my readers may have partly inferred, was not a Roman Consul, nor yet a French one. He had had the honor of representing this great republic at one of the Hanse towns, I forget which, in President Monroe's time. I don't recollect how long he held the 1 See Biographical Sketch, p. xxxii.

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