adviser, and confidant, and filled them with an honest and simple-hearted sincerity, which the most skilful flatterer that ever lived would have failed to imitate. She read the same books, sang the same songs, talked in the same tone, walked with the same air, and wore the same fashions; which upon her, she being naturally short and stout, and dark-eyed and rosy, had, as her brother William told her, about the same effect that armour similar to Don Quixote's would have produced upon Sancho Panza.

One of her chief services in the character of confidant, was of course to listen to the several love passages of which, since she was of the age of Juliet, her friend's history might be said to have consisted. How she had remained so long unmarried might have moved some wonder, since she seemed always immersed in the passion which leads to such a conclusion; but then her love was something like the stream that flowed before her door a shallow brooklet, easy to slip in, and easy to slip out. From two or three imprudent engagements her brother had extricated her; and from one, the most dangerous of all, she had been saved by her betrothed having been claimed the week before the nuptials by another wife. At the moment of which we write, however, the fair Selina seemed once more in a fair way to change her

name.

That she was fond of literature of a certain class we have already intimated; and, next after Sterne and Rousseau, the classics of her order, and their horde of vile imitators, whether sentimental novelists, or sentimental essayists, or sentimental dramatists, she delighted in the horde of nameless versifiers whom Gifford demo

lished; in other words, after bad prose her next favourite reading was bad verse; and as this sort of verse is quite as easy to write as to read-I should think of the two rather easier-she soon became no inconsiderable perpetrator of sonnets without rhyme, and songs without reason; and elegies, by an ingenious combination, equally deficient in both.

After writing this sort of verse, the next step is to put it in print; and in those days (we speak of above thirty years ago), when there was no Mrs. Hemans to send grace and beauty, and purity of thought and feeling, into every corner of the kingdom-no Mary Howitt to add the strength and originality of a manly mind to the sensibility of a womanly fancy,—in those days the Poet's Corner of a country newspaper was the refuge of every poetaster in the county. So intolerably bad were the acrostics, the rebuses, the epigrams, and the epitaphs, which adorned those asylums for fugitive pieces, that a selection of the worst of them would really be worth printing amongst the Curiosities of Literature. A less vainperson than Miss Selina Savage might have thought she did the Hampshire Courant honour in sending them an elegy on the death of a favourite bullfinch, with the signature of Eurinia.

It was printed forthwith, read with ecstatic admiration by the authoress and her friend, and with great amusement by William Marshall, who, now the spruce clerk of a spruce attorney, continued to divert himself with worming out of his simple sister all the secrets of herself and her friend, and then to pursue them with the most unmerciful ridicule. The elegy was printed, and in a fair way of being forgotten by all but the writer, when

in the next number of the Courant appeared a complimentary sonnet addressed to the authoress of the elegy, and signed Orlando.

Imagine the delight of the fair Eurinia! she was not in the least astonished,-a bad and inexperienced writer never is taken by surprise by any quantity of praise ;but she was charmed and interested as much as woman could be; she answered his sonnet by another (which, by the by, contained, according to Boileau's well-known recipe, and the practice of all nations, a quatrain too many;) he replied to her rejoinder; compliments flew thicker and faster; and the poetical correspondence between Orlando and Eurinia became so tender, that the Editor of the H ***shire Courant thought it only right to hint to the gentleman that the post-office would be a more convenient medium for his future communications.

As this intimation was accompanied by the address of the lady, it was taken in very good part; and before the publication of the next number of the provincial weekly journal, Miss Savage received the accustomed tribute of verse from Orlando, enveloped in a prose epistle, dated from a small town about thirty miles off, and signed Henry Turner.

An answer had been earnestly requested, and an answer the lady sent; and by return of post she received a reply, to which she replied with equal alertness; then came a love letter in full form; and then a petition for an interview; and to the first the lady answered anything but No! and to the latter she assented.

The time fixed for this important visit, it being now the merry month of May, was three o'clock in the day. He had requested to find her alone; and accordingly by one, P. M. she had dismissed her faithful confidante,

promising to write to her the moment Mr. Turner was gone, had given orders to admit no one but a young gentleman who sent in his visiting ticket (such being the plan proposed by the innamorato), and began to set herself and her apartment in order for his reception-she herself in an elegant dishabille, between sentimental and pastoral, and her room in a confusion equally elegant, of music, books, and flowers; Zimmermann and Lavater on the table; and one of those dramas, those tragedies bourgeoises, or comedies larmoyantes, which it seems incredible that Beaumarchais, he that wrote the two matchless plays of Figaro*, could have written, in her hand.

It was hardly two o'clock, full an hour before his time, when a double knock was heard at the door; Mr. Turner's card was sent in, and a well-dressed and welllooking young man ushered into the presence of the fair poetess. There is no describing such an interview. My readers must imagine the compliments and the blushes, the fine speeches de part et d'autre, the long words and the fine words, the sighings and the languishments. The lady was satisfied; the gentleman had no reason to complain; and after a short visit he left her, promising to return in the evening to take his coffee with her and her friend.

She had just sat down to express to that friend, in her accustomed high-flown language, the contentment of her heart, when another knock was followed by a second visiting ticket. "Mr. Turner again! Oh! I suppose

* I speak, of course, of the admirably brilliant French comedies, and not of the operas, whether English or Italian, which retaining the situations, and hardly the situations, have completely sacrificed the wit, the character, and the pleasantry of the delightful originals, and have almost as much tended to injure Beaumarchais' reputation as his own dullest dramas.

he has remembered something of consequence. Show him in."

And in came a second Mr. Turner!!

The consternation of the lady was inexpressible ! That of the gentleman, when the reason of her astonishment was explained to him, was equally vehement and flattering. He burst into eloquent threats against the impostor who had assumed his name, the wretch who had dared to trifle with such a passion, and such a ladye-love; and being equally well-looking and fine-spoken, full of rapturous vows and ardent protestations, and praise addressed equally to the woman and the authoress, conveyed to the enchanted Selina the complete idea of her lover-poet.

He took leave of her at the end of half an hour, to ascertain, if possible, the delinquent who had usurped his name and his assignation, purposing to return in the evening to meet her friend; and again she was sitting down to her writing table, to exclaim over this extraordinary adventure, and to dilate on the charms of the true Orlando, when three o'clock struck, and a third knock at the door heralded a third visiting ticket, and a third Mr. Turner!!!

A shy, awkward, simple youth, was this," the real Simon Pure!"-bowing and bashful, and with a stutter that would have rendered his words unintelligible even if time had been allowed him to bring them forth. But no time was allowed him. Provoked past her patience, believing herself the laughing-stock of the town, our sentimental fair one forgot her refinement, her delicacy, her fine speaking, and her affectation; and calling her maids and her footboy to aid, drove out her unfortunate suitor with such a storm of vituperation, such a torrent