self upon your friendship for advice, as the most unhappy of all beings. You must know I have the honour to be the daughter of that gallant sea officer Captain- ." Here she named an officer who will be ever dear to his country, ever deplored by it, and whose friendship is at once the joy and the affliction of my life. I started from my seat; the stroke I felt, when she pronounced a name so rooted in my heart, was like the shock of electricity; I clasped her hands in mine, and, pressing them, exclaimed-"You have a father,"-here I stoppedthe recollection stopped me from proceeding-for it was false." No, no, my child,” I said, 66 you have no father! nor had he a friend who can replace your loss; however, pray proceed."—"Implicitly," replied Calliope (for by that name I still must beg to call her, though that and poetry are both renounced for ever). "As you are the friend of my father, you must know that he lost my mother when I was an infant; two years are now passed since he perished; a miserable period it has been to me; I am now under the protection of a distant relation, who is an intimate of the lady of this house, and one whose ruinous flattery, jointly with Lady Thimble's, has conspired to turn my wretched head, and blast the only hope of happiness I had in my life. These learned ladies, as they would be thought, put me upon studies I was never fitted to, gave me this silly name Calliope, and never ceased inflaming my vanity till they persuaded me I had a talent for poetry: in this they were assisted by Mac-Infidel, who lives in great intimacy with Lady Thimble; the adulation of a learned man (for that he surely is) intoxicated me with selfopinion, and the gravity of his character completed the folly and destruction of mine.""What do I hear," said I, interrupting her, "the destruction of your character?”—“ Have patience,"

she replied: "when I disclose the sorrows of my heart, you will own that my destruction is complete." -Melancholy as these words were, the deduction, notwithstanding, that I drew from them was a relief compared to what I at first apprehended.- "Alas! Sir," resumed Calliope, "I have lost the affections of the most amiable, the most beloved of men: he was my father's darling, and from a boy was educated by him in the profession of the sea; he shared every service with my father except the last fatal one, in which your friend unhappily was lost. Providence, that ordained the death of the one, has in the same period enriched the other; he is lately returned from the West Indies, and by his duty has been confined to the port he arrived in, so that we have not met since his return to England. Here is the first letter he wrote to me from Plymouth; read it, I beseech you, and then compare it with the fatal one I received last night." Calliope put a letter into my hands, and I read as follows:

cr MY DEAREST NANCY!

"I have this instant brought my frigate to an anchor, and seize the first moment that my duty per mits, to tell the loveliest of her sex that I have luckily come across a prize that makes a man of me for life: a man did I say? Yes, and the happiest of men, if my dear girl is still true, and will consent to share the fortune of her faithful Henry.

"I cannot leave Plymouth this fortnight, therefore pray write to me under cover to my friend the Admiral. Yours, ever,

"HENRY CONSTANT."

When I had returned this letter to Calliope, she resumed her narrative in the following words :-"The joy this letter gave me set my spirits in such

a flow that, in the habit I was of writing verses, I could not bring my thoughts to run in humble prose, but, giving the reins to my fancy, filled at least six sides with rhapsodies in verse; and, not content with this, and foolishly conceiving that my poem would appear at least as charming to Henry as the flattery of my own sex had persuaded me it was to them, I enclosed a fair copy and sent it to him in a packet by the stage coach: the next return of the post brought me this fatal letter I received last night.

"MADAM,

"Though there cannot be in this world a task so painful to me as what I am now about to perform, yet I think it an indispensable point of honour to inform my late most lovely and beloved Nancy that, if I am to suppose her the author of that enormous bundle of verses I have received from her hand, it is the last favour that hand must bestow upon her unhappy Henry.

66

My education you know; for it was formed under your most excellent father; I served with him from a child, and he taught me, not indeed the knack of making verses, but what I hope has been as useful to my country, the duties of an officer. Being his daughter, I had flattered myself you would not like me the less for following his profession, or for being trained to it under his instruction. But, alas! Nancy, all these hopes are gone. My ignorance would only disgrace you, and your wit would make me contemptible; since you are turned poetess, how can my society be agreeable? If those verses you have sent me are all your own making, you must have done little else since we parted, and if such are to be your studies and occupations, what is to become of all the comforts of a husband? How are

you to fulfil the duties of a mother, or manage the concerns of a family? No, no; may heaven defend me from a learned wife! I am too proud to be the butt of my own table! too accustomed to command, to be easily induced to obey; let me ever live a single man, or let the wife I choose be modest, unpretending, simple, natural in her manners, plain in her understanding: let her be true as the compass I sail by, and (pardon the coarseness of the allusion), obedient to the helm as the ship I steer; then, Nancy, I will stand by my wife, as I will by my ship, to the latest moment I have to breathe. For God's sake, what have women to do with learning? But if they will step out of their own profession and write verses, do not let them step into ours to choose husbands; we shall prove coarse messmates to the

muses.

"I understand so much of your poetical epistle as to perceive that you are in the family of Sir Theodore and Lady Thimble: three days of such society would make me forswear matrimony for ever. To the daughter of my friend I must for ever speak and act as a friend; suffer me then to ask if any man in his senses will choose a wife from such a school? Oh grief to think! that one so natural, so sincere and unaffected as was my Nancy, could be the companion of such an ugly petticoated pedant as Lady Thimble, such a tame hen-pecked son of a tailor as Sir Theodore!

"As for the volume of verses you sent me, I dare say it is all very fine, but I really do not comprehend three lines of it; the battles you describe are what I never saw by sea or land, and the people who fight them such as I have never been accustomed to serve with one gentleman I perceive there is, who combats stoutly against love; it is a good moral, and I

thank you for it; cost what it may, I will do my

best to imitate your hero.

"Farewell,

"I must be only your most faithful friend,

"HENRY CONSTANT."

No. VII.

CALLIOPE has favoured me with the following letter; it is dated from the house of a worthy clergyman, a friend of her father's, who with an exemplary wife lives upon a small country vicarage in primitive simplicity, where that afflicted young lady took

shelter.

"SIR,

"After you left me at Lady Thimble's, I seized the first moment, that the anguish of my mind permitted me to make use of, to put myself in readiness for taking my final leave of that family, and, according to the plan we had concerted, came without delay to this place, where, if any thing could have given absolute peace to my mind, the consolation of these excellent people, and the serenity of the scene must have done it. As it was, I felt my afflictions lighten, my self-reproach became less bitter, and, whilst the vanity, which flattery had inspired me with, has been cured by their admonitions, the doubts that infidelity had raised have been totally removed, and truth made clear to my eternal comfort and conviction. Had it not been for this I should have been given up to despair; for as I heard no more from Captain Constant, I was convinced he had renounced me for ever; in the mean time I wrote many letters, but sent none to him; some of these letters were written in a high tone, most of them in a humble one, and