never surpassed, she united a grace of movement, that would have been coquetry had it not been the gift of nature.-With the rash liveliness and abandon of a child, she combined an almost matronly tone of conversation arising from much travel rather than from great cultivation of mind.

There was something absolutely startling in her decision of tone,-a decision that did not however a moment put in peril her elegance of feminine gentleness. She was literally adorable -a thing to put in a shrine, and fall down before, and worship!—

I will not swear that what O'Brien found me writing that night, when he brought in my hot water, (and which, but for the inequality of the lines he might have mistaken for a letter to my banker, or Mr. Scriven Screwham,) did not bear some reference to the shape of light which had glanced athwart my path.—I had every excuse.-Lady Phoebe was a creature to have made a poet of Joseph Hume !—

But

Not that my nature is lyrically addicted. Sonnets and gentil-Bernard-isms in the style of my motto, I leave to our young Viscounts, a corps d'élite called the Countess of Blessington's Voltigeurs, who get amazing credit at Almacks by rhyming for the Annuals. I have no objection to a good strong honest verse, warm out of the depths of the heart, and sweet as the fragrance of a beanfield; which, like those of Burns, finds its echo in every memory, from palace to hovel ;-enbalming the simplest thoughts and feelings for immortality, as the spikenard and rich gums of Egypt have preserved for thousands of centuries some humble bird or insect of the pastures of the Nile, sacred and secure amid the mummied reliques of high-priests and kings.

But I reverence the gift of song, rather as the comfort of the poor than the luxury of the richa divine vouchsafement, like the flower in the fields or thrush in the thicket ;-to solace the ear and eye of those who toil through

life with moistened brows and callous hands, as hewers of wood, or drawers of water, and the only indication that reaches them of fairer and brighter things;-something to beguile the weariness of the spinning wheel,-the restlessness of the cradled child,-the labour of the husbandman at his plough,—of the miner at his squalid task of the soldier plodding with blistered foot upon a foreign soil.—I have stood among the vineyards in France and listened to a chorus of peasant voices chaunting the stirring measures of Béranger;-I have stood by Tweedside listening to the song of the reapers, till I forgot to despise the vocation of "these same metre ballad-mongers."

I do not pretend to be a Burns,-I do not pretend to be a Béranger,-I do not pretend to be a Poet!--If people want poets, there are Baillie Cochrane, and Johnny Manners, Lords Powerscourt, Jocelyn, Gardner, and the Houses of Lords and Commons know how many more men of wit and pleasure about town. All I

pretend, is to turn a rhyme when wanted for a white morocco album, super-gilt, lined with blue tabby, and locked with a golden key studded with turquoises, such as one finds in the choice boudoirs of May Fair. I have no doubt Lady Phoebe Locksley had a dozen such volumes; and it was probably in the hope of getting them inscribed therein, in the most delicately illegible of hands upon the most satin of papers, that I strung together the following Della Cruscan

STANZAS.

I dreamt one day a waking dream,
Brighter than Slumber's are,

Of wandering where the planets gleam,
Like an unsphered star;

Round a Chimera's yielding neck

With grasping hands I clung;

No need of spur,-no fear of check,—
Those fields of air among.

It had a woman's lovely face,
It had an angel's wings,-

And as we pierc'd the realms of space

Breath'd gentlest whisperings;

That strange Chimera, wild of wing,
Though fair of face and form,-
Soft as the genial breath of spring,
Bold as the mountain storm;
Dearest!-its name, its origin,

Oh! canst thou not divine?

It was-forgive, forgive, the sin,—

The thought that thou wert mine!

I was roused from my dactyls and spondees, by a knock at the door,-my own door I mean, -for that of Mivart is like a royal charter, inviolable; — when lo! a scared and pallid waiter, who told me he could not find O'Brien,

-(I wonder where the caitiff was hiding himself?) and that a person had brought a note requiring an immediate answer.