"when she came to the bower he had shaded for her," and therein breathed vows of eternal devotion-vows pure, fragrant, and fleeting as the evening dew, that bathed her raven tresses as they floated over the snow-drifts of her bosom. All that is a farce, whether in one or three acts. But love-affairs, when the lovers are full-grown men and women, although perhaps twenty years have not passed over either of their heads, are at least tragi-comedies, and sometimes tragedies; closing, if not in blood-although that, too, when the fates are angry-yet in clouds that darken all future life,—and that now and then lose their sullen blackness only when dissolving, through the transient sunshine, in a shower of tears!

Therefore, hail to the gloomy but ever glorious Glen, in which, many many long and short years ago, we met the Lady of our love! Reader, we told you in our "Birds," (see No. CIX.) of our first boy-passion for the Maid of the Mill; and we asked the winds of heaven to waft the tears from our old eyes, to bedew the primroses smiling on her unforgotten grave. But we speak now of the passion that came suddenly against the heart of manhood, and having stormed the citadel, put the whole garrison to the sword. Ay, there was havoc thereand carnage! Let prim people pertly prate about a ruling passion, and versify it into sickly sonnets and queasy quatrains. While our ruling passion reigned; while of it, it might have been said, "bacchatur in aulis," all others fled or perished. Every sunrise and every sunset, for two months of the celestial summer of 17-7, we beheld her by appointment, and it was kept by her as duly as the angels keep theirs who move the spheres of heaven, floating down the glen towards the arbour that nature embowered for love. Light, music, and fragrance, she came softly into our trembling arms; and at the touch of her cheek on ours, fled the whole visible and audible world. There were no vows of eternal love, for such vows betray a lurking fear that there may be-an end of the insupportable bliss! Our love we felt to be immortal, as we gazed on the rising or setting sunlight, and to be prolonged, in every embrace, into the regions of a future life. My wife was an orphan. Wife, said I

Oh! blot out the word with rueful' with bloody tears! For two years of absence and of distance brought a strange, dim, misty haze over the fires -supposed unquenchable of our hearts; then came suspicion, distrust, wrathful jealousy, and stone-eyed despair! Some fiend of the air had, with leer malign, seen us in the Bower of Paradise, and soon as we were, for a short season, as we thought, aparthe breathed poison into both our hearts, and changed, at last, our love into hatred! Oh! that " hatred" is a hideous and an ugsome word, and never, never surely could with truth be inflicted on us who had lain so often in one another's arms-bosom to bosom in the bower of sighs! Yet, "what is writ is writ," and if the senseless letters must remain, let tears of mutual penitence, contrition, and remorse, blot out all disastrous frailty from our long-pacified and forgiving hearts! Wife of mine was she neverbut one hour, when, all unknown to her, I was within a hundred yards of the church, (the marriage was in England,) she became a bride. One of those accursed rings, that are cast in millions by imps swarming round an infernal furnace, and purchased in the gross by that great merchant, both in the home and foreign market, Mammon, and then retailed by small devils of dealers all over Christendom, as avowed agents of the Pseudo-Hymen, was forced upon that delicate finger, whose shape I knew so well, and whose warm snow melted not beneath my kisses, although they were kisses of the burning flame. Out she issued from the church-porch, blushing, yet pale as death whenever the blush passed away, (and often did it come and go between porch and gate,) and drowned, quite drowned, in tears! The beast her husband allowed her powerless arm to lie within his, with no more apparent emotion in his face, except something like a poor paltry pride, than if that arm, through whose blue veinery Aowed and reflowed blood as pure as the celestial ichor in an angel's wings, had belonged to a layfigure, propped up against the wall as a model for a portrait painter to work by, when forging a lie for a fast-aging maiden who had missed the money and the marriage market, in her native land, and was about to send her Eidolon, as her forerunner, to India.

must be told out, for without a catas➡ trophe, a story, especially a true one, is like a knotless thread. Well, the Baronet-for he had a title and a small one is better than none, and ought to be acted on throughout all the minutiæ of its rights and privilegesmade for several years a most excellent and exemplary husband-and that year he was High Sheriff, his lady, although very thin and very pale, was the most beautiful by far of all the beauties in the Assize Ball-room. But what will you think when you are told that about a month before the Baronet had headed his javelin men, he had found a huge bundle of loveletters in the secret drawers of his wife's cabinet? There's a Diana for you!-the mother, too, of three dead children-for all her children diedand pretty creatures must they have been, especially her first-born, who faded away in her fifth summer-the others were never more than mere crying babes. He was so unpolite-so mean, if you choose to call it so as to read them all, one after the other, over and over, twenty and forty times, from the " my beloved and beautiful Glendoveer," (a creature of the element in oriental climes, and here put poetice for my dearest Jane,) down to " yours till death and burial," C. N. inclusive! Yes, C. N. the very signature that you saw t'other month appended to that unpardonable Preface. She had not had heart to burn the letters that I used to put with my own hand into her bosom, silently breathing thoughts that I dared not utter. Words were there that by no husband could be borne, although, when they were written, his base existence and illustrious name were to us both unknown. Not unaccompanied with kisses had been words such as these-nor would the hand have dared to indite them, that had not embraced the bosom to which they were poured forth in the exulting yet reverential language of liege and loyal love. Our attachment had been no secret to him; but till that fatal moment, when he pulled out a little tiny drawer in an ivory-studded bijoux, which seemed contrived only for holding thimbles and nettingrods, but was full of the smouldering fires of ungovernable passion-he knew not that such feelings had ever been below the sun. But now he knew that they had been inspired by,

and breathed back in return into that bosom, which, however it may have heaved of yore in tumultuous passion, had ever been to him, cold almost and insensate as the beautiful marble bosom of an image lying on a tomb.

The Baronet had been High-Sheriff, and as ambition will be mounting, he must needs be Member of Parliament-not exactly one of the county members--for others were Yorkshire too-but for a borough. But the Whig interest was overbought by the bills of a Jew broker, and the Baronet was a ruined man. Many a better and many a worse man have shot themselves, as he did, before and since; yet the event was one of the most unexpected of the kind that had occurred in that part of the county for a good many years, and did not fail to be spoken of with some regret for several weeks. I cannot with truth say, that, on the first hearing, it made much impression upon me; but in about an hour or so, my whole soul underwent the nature of a revolution.

She is free from fetters now, I exclaimed to myself, and I will cherish her yet in my heart of hearts. For her sake, and she knows it well, have I been a wanderer over the face of the earth, For her sake have I been alone in the world, a moody man, with blasted hopes, and shunned even by my blood relations (poor devils!) as a misanthrope. One hour in each other's arms -not with the same transports as in the glen-bower, but in sober, pensive, pathetic, and melancholy bliss, and all ungentle thoughts will dissolve away in our tears-and the love, the sorely faded, but still the same love of other years, return. Give me but that silken head once more meekly rested on my breast, and all my errors-all my frailties-all my follies-all my sins-will be forgiven by one dewy glance of those uplifted eyes, and the earth will be again a garden of Eden, although somewhat tarnished the hues and deadened the odours of the flowers of happiness!

Oh! little, little during that insane hour, did I know either of mine own or that lady's heart! The vain dream dissolved, and I felt that I loved her no more. She had loved another! no -that never could have been-that never was-for I have her own word for it, and she was ever the soul of truth, then surely when lying on the

bed of death. But she had lain in his bosom-had borne him children-and loved them living and dead, partly for his sake! Not, at least, for mine-no —hell and furies-not for mine!-for the traitress had broken our vows, and in punishment that was sent from a just heaven, had seen child after child in its death-clothes. 'Twas well that the imps-all of them probably, boys and girls alike, with the father's peculiar expression-never a pleasant one, even when he was pleased had all been put out of sight; and what matters it that an old Yorkshire family, in the West Riding, should be no more? For distinguished, there is something laughable in the substitution of the word extinguished-" alike, but oh! how different!"

In about half a year after her husband's suicide, I had a letter from her, saying that she was dying, and wished to see me. I went, and she died in my arms. Her last embrace was of the kind fittest for us both-and if heaven's gates were shut against her, all the generations of man are, and will for ever be, buried in unrising dust!

Thirty years, or nearly so, have fled since that farewell. But never oncealthough several times I have ventured within a mile of it-have I visited the Glen. I could as easily visit her grave. Perhaps I may yet do both. She was buried in a vault, which ought not to have been, for her grave should have been free to the flowers and the sunbeams. But, methinks, the huge massy gate will fall back on its rusty hinges, if I but hold out my handand as for the Glen-Bower, may it be in latest autumn that I revisit it-one long, silent, divine gaze, and then, like the sere and yellow leaf, may my life be whirled away into the unknown world!

Now, dear reader, but somewhat perhaps too credulous, what assurance can you possibly have that all this fine pathetic tale is not one of the most unprovoked lies that was ever uttered by the editor of a periodical publication? Nothing at once so easy and so delightful, in this poetical and imaginative age, as to tell lies by the hour, -nothing at once so difficult and distressful, as to speak truth by the minute. We cannot think, that under such circumstances, the truth ought always to be told. In our opinion, the

truth ought seldom or never to be told, for then it becomes as dull and tedious as a thrice-repeated tale. Utter a small gold coin of truth now and then, and you will be amazed how slowly it circulates. Try a paperfalsehood, and it passes current in countries where they will not look at that of a bank, with one dead and one sleeping partner. Now, if every syllable of the above pathos be a fiction, what worse are we than Shakspeare, or Byron, or Scott? We cannot help thinking that there is some truth in it; but we confess that one thing we concealed. But now we shall out with itit was current at the time that OUR

MARRIAGE WAS OFF, BECAUSE WE SPLIT UPON SETTLEMENTS!

Many a sincere and passionate attachment in real life has had such undignified ending, and is it not real life that the rational critics are now constantly demanding, with all its outlines defined against the selfsame firmament that rains, and blows, and thunders, and lightens, and under the name of atmosphere has various qualities of its character indicated by thermometers and barometers? We have given you real life, and how do you like it? Does it come too near home? Would trustees not allow you to lay your great, wide, filthy paw on the whole of the simple young creature's patrimony, settling it all (not a life-rent merely) upon yourself, in case of her dying childless? Yes-dying childless! And these shocking words you see inserted with your own eyes, on the morning of your marriage-day! Really, real life is a very mean and odious thing-we fear, that however high it may be, it is low-and that that writer would imitate humanity most abominably, who exhibited it bare-faced, bare-bosomed, and with the window in the breast wide open, uncanvassed and uncurtained, for the inspection of every street-passenger. Truth should be like gin-twist, half and half. Too much diluted with the waters of fiction, it is weak and wersh, and apt to turn the stomach. The pure spirit knocks you down like a hammer. But "half and half" kindles a mutual affection between you and the whole world.

Why, things have come to a pretty pass, methinks we hear some whining Whig decry, when the world is asked to listen to the classical confessions of

the gouty Editor of the most libellous periodical of any age or country-for such, according to the fama clamosa of that pitiful part of the press, is the character of rosy - fingered, silvertongued Maga, still smiling graciously like the dawning of morn. But grant that we are as libellous as gouty,what then were, or are, Voltaire, Rousseau, Byron, Jeffrey, Gifford, Brougham, Playfair, and a hundred others? Libellers all. And pray, what the worse men were they, or are they, for all the libels that ought to have set several of them in the pillory? Did not Byron's heart and soul overflow with all manly and humane affections, in spite of spite, and during the very disease of rancour? Is not one love poem of his, breathed one hour, and forgotten by him the next, worth all the drivelling of you and all the other amiable characters in the kingdom, were you to drivel amatory effusions till the rheum ceased to flow from your over-aged eyes? What although he libelled his way through society, from the King upon the throne, to the very meanest of his subjects? All the world loves his memory. Where could you find a bitterer, more venomous body, than old Gifford? Yet is he universally respected, for his bitterness changed many a scribbling blockhead into an inoffensive man, and he spat his venom chiefly on corroded Cockneys, whom it was pleasant to see writhing in the dead-thraws.

His friends know him to be one of the best of enlightened and religious men ; and as his Quarterly accounts have long been found correct, so will his accounts of all sorts pass at the last general audit. We offer to fill the largest church in Edinburgh with authors, their wives, and parents, and sons, and daughters, and cousins, who shall carry Mr Jeffrey by acclamation to be the greatest libeller of all the Spirits of the Age, that spiritual essence, Hazlitt himself, not excluded-yet who more amiable than Mr Jeffrey, or less like a person who, it has been voted, would not scruple, if he had courage, to assassinate the most virtuous grinder in all Grub-street? We stop here, for we have said enough to show, that we alleged libellers are the wisest and best of men, and that were we to unlock the treasures of our inner spirits, and fling them before the world, there would be thenceforth no need for assessments

for support of intellectual and moral pauperism; for the whole population would be so enriched, that each rejected contributor would be a Croesus, and strike his name off all the poor lists of parish and of press.

Heaven preserve us, what is it o'clock? Our watch is run down, and fast asleep, pointing in its dream to half past one. What will mine host and hostess at the Crook be thinking of the old gentleman? They will be suspicious of an assignation and intrigue with some yellow-hair'd lassie of the Braes. Our character is at stake; but our innocence is known to Heaven, and "conscia sidera testor." One tumbler of hot toddy-and then to bed to make harmless love to the four shepherdesses sitting on the curtains on four dimity knolls-look which way we will by the rushlight, ogling us with bashful solicitations when sinking away into stoical repose.

Mortifying thought to human vanity! we have never been missed; and on entering into the kitchen, we stand for several minutes unnoticed in the roar of laughter that shakes the mutton-hams dangling from the porch-like chimney. The gudewife jaloused that we had gone to roost, and she had shut up the trans-doors, that we might not be disturbed by the merry-making. Rustic wit, ignorant_in its originality of Joe Miller, has, during all the hours of our river-side reverie, been dirling the rafters, and rough and ready at repartee, has never once waited for an encore. Strapping queans too are there, rising from the knees of lovers, and disengaging fond hands from soft bosoms, at our sudden apparition. Lassies, spare your blushes before the mild old man; for "honi soit qui mal y pense," which, being interpreted, is "evil to him who evil thinks." Rax down the fiddle from the peg, for we can handle her, and here goes a strathspey. There is no spring in the earthen floor, but there is one in every instep; and every reel has a kiss by way of introduction and postliminious preface. Better to overlook the fun, we mount a stool (not the cutty, for that is an old story, and even then our sex protected us,) and our Niel-Gow-like bowhand brings down our well-calculated elbow, at every stroke, within an inch of the red tappetoury on auld Saunders's broad blue bonnet. What daffin and