shape, and in some degree, the slaves, the worshippers, and the victims !

A story occurs to my recollection, illustrative of another operation of this variously-acting principle, keeping it up, that will be novel to most readers, and not uninteresting to any. Many years ago it made its appearance where it now perhaps lies buried, amidst a mass of parliamentary news and political disquisition; * but it is an excellent story, and is related by a pen which, whatever may be its defects, never wanted the English literary virtue of being clear, homely, and expressive. It is as true and direct as Defoe.

cases.

"I was once acquainted with a famous shooter; he was a barrister of Philadelphia, but became far more renowned by his gun than his law We spent scores of days together a-shooting, and were extremely well matched; I having excellent dogs, and caring little about my reputation as a shot, his dogs being good for nothing, and he caring more about his reputation as a shot than as a lawyer. The fact which I am going to relate respecting this gentleman, ought to be a warning to young men how they become enamoured of this species of vanity. We had gone about ten miles from our home, to shoot, where partridges were said to be plentiful. We found them so. In the course of a November day he had, just before dark, shot, and sent to the farm-house, or kept in his bag, ninety-nine partridges. He made some few double shots, and he might have a miss or two, for he sometimes shot when out of my sight, on account of the woods. However, he said that he killed at every shot; and, as he had counted the birds when he went to dinner at the farmhouse, and when he cleaned his gun, he, just before sunset, knew that he had killed ninety-nine partridges, every one upon the wing, and a great part of them in woods very thickly set with large trees. It was a grand achievement; but, unfortunately, he wanted to make it a hundred! The sun was setting; and in that country, darkness comes almost at once; it is more like the going out of a candle than that of a fire; and I wanted to be off, as we had a very bad road to go, and as he, being under strict petticoat government, to which he most loyally and dutifully submitted, was compelled to get home that night, taking me with him-the vehicle (horse and gig) being mine. I therefore pressed him to come away, and moved on, in haste to be off. No; he would kill the hundredth bird! In vain did I talk of the bad road, and its many dangers for want of

* In Cobbett's Register.

moon.

The poor partridges, which we had scattered about, were calling all around us; and, just at this moment, up got one under his feet, in a field in which the wheat was three or four inches high. He shot, and missed. That's it!' said he, running as if to pick up the bird. 'What!' said I, 'you don't think you killed, do you? Why, there is the bird now, not only alive, but calling in that wood;' which was at about a hundred yards distance. He, in that form of words usually employed in such cases, asserted that he shot the bird, and saw it fall; and I, in much about the same form of words, asserted that he had missed; and that I, with my own eyes, saw the bird fly into the wood. This was too much!-to miss once out of a hundred times! To lose such a chance of immortality! He was a good-humoured man; I liked him very much; and I could not help feeling for him, when he said, 'Well, Sir, I killed the bird; and if you choose to go away, and take your dog away, so as to prevent me from finding it, you must do it: the dog is yours, to be sure.” 'The dog,' said I, in a very mild tone; why, there is the spot; and could we not see it, upon this smooth green surface, if it was there?' However, he began to look about; and I called the dog, and affected to join him in his search. Pity for his weakness got the better of my dread of the bad road. After walking backwards and forwards many times upon about twenty yards square, with our eyes fixed to the ground, looking for what both of us knew was not there, I had passed him (he going one way, and I the other), and I happened to be turning round just after I had passed him, when I saw him putting his hand behind him, take a partridge out of his bag, and let it fall upon the ground! I felt no temptation to detect him, but turned away my head, and kept looking about. Presently he, having returned to the spot where the bird was, called out to me, in a most triumphant tone, Here! Here! Come here!' I went up to him, and he pointing with his finger down to the bird, and looking hard in my face, at the same time, said, 'There, I hope that will be a warning to you never to be obstinate again!' 'Well,' said I, 'come along;' and away we went, as merry as larks. When we got to Brown's, he told them the story, triumphed over me most clamorously; and though he often repeated the story to my face, I never had the heart to let him know that I knew of the imposition, which puerile vanity had induced so sensible and honourable a man to be mean enough to practise."

This, oh! sweet little Lucy S, is no uninstructive chapter in the history of human character, if you will but bow your head quietly to read it. This all comes of the determination not to give in; in other words, of that same disposition to "keep it up," whereof we are discoursing; and he who permits himself to be so

carried away by vanity, may perchance fall headlong into a deeper sea than the aeronaut whose machine bursts a mile above the broad ocean. Cobbett's "famous shooter" had a reputation to keep up, but he was at least as expert with the longbow as with the gun, and could maintain a falsehood as easily as he could fire.

Let those, dear Lucy, who are but just beginning their course of lies in life, only think for an instant, how and by what means sportsmen of this order, when they have once declared that they brought down their bird, will dare to keep up their fiction! by what means, being wrong at first, they will at all risks move further from right, rather than own the error! What cloaks of falsehood (that become as winding-sheets) they will fling around them, to conceal the first flimsy garb of deception which vanity had prompted them to put on! What blackness they will dye their brows in, rather than be seen to blush!

Oh! my Lucy Snever in your own person can you need a lesson so grave as this; but you may require to learn that people should not keep it up overmuch, even when the object is but a shuttlecock. Some will keep up their very jokes, until they are echoed by sighs of pain instead of laughter; their little friendly hoaxes and mystifications, until they become offences dire. Some cannot so much as fall into the humour of a lively laughing game of frights, without frightening somebody else into fits; they must keep it up. Be not this fault thine.

But to show thee that every rule has its exception, take this loving, if still needless, hint into thy gentle keeping. When thou hast a good cause to uphold, a cause just and generous, uphold it perseveringly, let it not fall: and as, unburdened by ill thoughts or ill deeds, thy conscientious little head, amidst the many

that hang down abashed and afraid, is turned, in thy wanderings upon earth, toward the heaven where angels weep over the fantastic tricks of mortals-why, "keep it up!"

WOMEN AND THEIR MASTERS.

"Most women have no characters at all."-POPE.

No characters! What then, thought I the other evening, as Martha entered to light the reading-lamp, whilst I again took up the volume which had been laid down as the shadows of twilight came on, and prepared to pursue my pleasant way through the curious and original pages of "Woman and her Master;" what then must become of that hapless majority of the female race (poor things!) who depend upon servitude in some shape or other for existence; who in infinite forms and endless diversities of occupation, are handmaidens unto us the masculine ringers of bells and issuers of mandates; and who, if destitute of "characters," can have no situation in society, no place in creation!

It was, perhaps, the entrance of Martha that turned the tide of my thoughts into this channel, suddenly diverting the course of speculation from the grand subject of woman and her master to a single branch of it; to the condition of one great class of womankind, maids of all-work, mop-spinners multitudinous, household varieties, all coming under one sweeping denomination, though all ranking in due degree, whether as plain cooks or pretty nursemaids-Betty Finnikins ad infinitum.

Lady Morgan's researches and reflections had pre

viously suggested a train of ideas associated, not with Woman and her Master, but with Man and his Mistress, which it would here be irrelevant to pursue at any length. Enough if we turn from any historical facts that may be adduced in proof of the injustice and barbarity of the mastership which man has claimed and established over woman, to contemplate the state and condition of the half-dozen powdered and gold-laced lackeys whose souls hang on the breath of any mortal dowager that shall be named! Turn we to that picture and see what a fearfully avenging spirit it portrays! It may be perfectly true, for aught we know quite positively to the contrary, that the profligate Menelaus deserted his fond and faithful wife, and then accused her of eloping with the Trojan youth; and it may be equally true that Mr. Brownrigg, about a century ago, was in reality the perpetrator of that atrocity in the coal-hole upon two unfortunate apprentices, of which it was the fate of poor innocent Mrs. B. to bear the punishment and ignominy. Still that pair of flashy footmen yonder, specimens of the lordly superfority of man, having a soul apiece, and hanging on behind my Lady Lacklustre's carriage, as it is whisked from shop to shop, and house to house, on errands the most frivolous, and enterprises the least dignified imaginable; those two samples of the "beauty of the world," the "paragon of animals," the "quintessence of dust," reduced to that extremity, are evidences of a horrible system of retaliation, and prove woman to be exceedingly well inclined to pull down, wherever she may, the boasted dignity of the master, man.

"Man to man so oft unjust

Is always so to woman,"

insists another great authority; but man is not so unjust