his performances and his character was striking; it was curious to see a drunken fellow boasting about that he could whip any man in the world, and then have him go and do it.

CE

I

`ELIA, who was here two years ago, was a girl with large dark eyes, which had a kind of down upon them. might have hesitated about speaking of an eye with down upon it, but I remember the poets have authorized this kind of eye, and have classified it as "velvet." She wore one of those straw hats which the young ladies here get at the Hutfabrik. These hats are trimmed with cherries; the contrast between the bright cherries and the velvet eyes produced a shock in the mind of the looker-on. She was a singular girl. When you saw her and heard her talk for the first time, you might have had a question about her, she was so free and

bold. But you quickly unlearned that impression. She is of Irish blood, and she has the fierce propriety of that race. She has little education. But she has great native force of mind, and, without the least suspicion that she is clever, a wisdom and culture which are the result of a passionate study of life.

Since then she has married. Like many clever and able women, she chose a nobody, but, I believe, a very nice nobody, at any rate a nobody that suited her. This year she has returned with her husband. I met her this morning driving. She had changed somewhat; but the change was not greater than might be produced by two years

and years of such importance in the kaleidoscopic progress of the human countenance. The cheek was somewhat paler, and the vigorous and handsome fea

tures somewhat more projected and separate. But the face and figure had the same easy strength; with this, however, there was associated a tranquil expression of having accomplished something in the world. Beside her was a nurse holding in her arms a pompous mass of lace and baby clothes, which enwrapped some highly important piece of red humanity.

I have found at the Zwieback library a copy of Sterne's Letters, in which I have come across the following sentence. He is writing to "Eliza," the young lady with whom he fell in love in his old age, and he says: "Let me give thee one straight rule of conduct, that thou hast heard from my lips in a thousand forms

6

but I concentre it in one word, Reverence thyself." " Readers of Sterne have a feeling that he was wanting in this qual

ity. But I fancy he has not been fairly treated. One should view Thackeray's judgment upon this writer with some allowance. Thackeray, of all the English writers of his age, had the greatest power of drawing to himself the sympathies of men. His literary judgments have therefore been influential. Yet, richly gifted a man as he was, he had scarcely more than a fair critical judgment. In his critical papers he appears at times to have been more bent on producing an eloquent flourish or writing up to the expectations of his admirers than upon really apprehending the authors he criticized. Such an eminent man need not ponder and discriminate like an inferior person, but might dash off his opinions in the course of the morning.

I have also been reading Sterne's Sermons, being curious to find how he had preached