He swears to be true till death, and finds it exceedingly difficult to remember the lady through six weeks of absence. Every man in love will gravely assert things which he knows to be mathematically false. That his affianced or his wife is the best and handsomest woman in the world, and that he is the happiest man. Every Mr. Tompkins or Mr. Smith says the same thing. Yet does not chance regulate our love affairs? Is not marriage a perfect lottery? If we reside in any town or city long enough, and are of a marrying turn, we must marry some woman living there or staying there temporarily. Yet next door to us may have lived one whom we should have loved ten thousand times better if we had known her. We may have seen the same woman a hundred and fifty times before we began to think her an angel, or even the best and handsomest woman in the world, or the only one we could possibly love. We may have been goaded on to the match by interested motives. We may be making diligent inquiries respecting the lady's tocher. We get

up in the morning an ordinary despairing bachelor with our affections unengaged. In the course of the forenoon we gain the required intelligence which decides us; we propose and are accepted, and at five o'clock precisely we have found the best and handsomest woman in the world, and have become the happiest man in the universe."

"How can you talk such nonsense, Ernest?" said Mrs. Basil, "I am sure we would be better playing chess than listening to you."

"If your lot had been cast in the celestial empire," continued Ernest, unmoved, "would you not equally have found your phoenix there? Ergo! Love affairs are regulated by chance, and marriage is a lottery. As for me, I have become so sceptical in these things, that the very fact of people being engaged would induce me to wager that they will never be married."

Miss Lawrence listened attentively to all this logic, and made no other reply than casting a glance of her lustrous orbs upon the

speaker, while Miss Saunders took up the cudgels warmly for her sex.

66

Surely, Mr. Basil, you don't mean to say that you don't believe in a sincere attachment? If now a girl loved you faithfully, could you go away and forget her?"

Thus brought to a dead lock, Ernest would either evade the question with a joke, or, finding it impossible to escape without a serious reply, he would labour with all the eloquence in his power to remove the impression of his being a gallant gay Lothario, a bee roving from flower to flower, a knight who loves and rides away, or, to speak without metaphor, that most despicable of things a being without a

heart.

"You do not exactly understand me yet, I see, Miss Saunders. In my effort to view a subject philosophically and rationally, I am obliged to include men and women in a broad comprehensive view, while I admit the existence of many exceptions. Though I have never been in love, I doubt not the existence

What

of the passion any more than friendship, and just on the same principle that I would never forget those to whom I owe gratitude. I can conceive myself so bound to a female friend through years and years of absence. annoys me is to hear people without hearts themselves sitting in judgment on me because I have too much experience to believe every selfish young man or woman a hero or a heroine. That common-place love which is professed every day is something widely different from the passion which only master minds can feel and describe. Take Shakespeare for instance. Who can read his works and not be convinced that he had experienced love. But he did not love his wife, an exceedingly common-place woman, older than himself, whom he married when a mere youth, full of romance, and unconscious of his own undeveloped powers. What right had such a woman to marry Shakespeare, or expect to engross the affections of such a man; of course he ran away from her-very properly."

Another arch look from Miss Lawrence, and a laugh from both girls; but Mrs. Basil would not see it in a humourous light.

"You ought to be ashamed to advance such extraordinary and immoral opinions, Ernest."

2

You exemplify the strictly virtuous and exemplary world, my mother, who will make no allowance for the failings of genius. It was a pity, if you like, for Shakespeare, or Milton, or other men of genius ever to marry the wives they did; but as to living with them, trying to find nourishment and sympathy where none existed, who could expect it. Anne Hatheway's name has come down to posterity simply from being the wife of Shakespeare, but that he ever drew his inimitable heroines from her, or that her image occupied his mind when he wrote his sonnets, I can never believe. I love to read his Antony and Cleopatra and fancy it history, or at least surrender myself to the veil of romance that he has thrown over those two personages. Antony-the eloquent, ambitious, world-conquering, revelling, pleasure-loving