the house with the elegance and sportiveness of a tame fawn, and omitted no opportunity of paying my court to the pretty and gentle little animal; whilst Romeo (for such was his name also) felt, with the remarkable instinct which dogs and children so often display, the truth of my professions, the reality and sincerity of my regard, and not only returned my caresses with interest, but showed a marked preference for my society; would waylay me in the hall, follow me up stairs and down, accompany me into my friend's drawing-room, steal after me to my own bedchamber, and, if called by his master and mistress, would try to entice me into their part of the domicile, and seem so glad to welcome me to their apartments, that it furnished an additional reason for my frequent visits to those accomplished young people.

In short, it was a regular flirtation; and when I went away, next to the dear and excellent friends whom I was leaving, I lamented the separation from Romeo. Although I had a pet dog at home, (when was I ever without one?) and that dog affectionate and beautiful, I yet missed the beautiful and affectionate Ita

lian greyhound. And Romeo missed me. My friends wrote me word that he wandered up the house and down; visited all my usual haunts; peeped into every room where he had ever seen me; listened to every knock; and was for several days almost as uneasy as if he had lost his own fair mistress.

Two years passed before I again visited Newman-street: and then, crossing the hall in conversation with my kind hostess, just as I reached the bottom of the staircase I heard, first a cry of recognition, then a bounding step, and then, almost before I saw him, with the speed of lightning Romeo sprang down a whole flight of stairs, and threw himself on my bosom, trembling and quivering with delight, and nestling his delicate glossy head close to my cheek, as he had been accustomed to do during our former intercourse.

Poor, pretty Romeo! he must be dead long ago! But Mr. John Hayter may remember, perhaps, giving me a drawing of him, trailing a wreath of roses in front of an antique vase; a drawing which would be valuable to any one, as it combines the fine taste of one of our most

tasteful painters with the natural grace of his elegant favourite; but which, beautiful as it is, I value less as a work of art than as a most faithful and characteristic portrait of the gentle and loving creature, whom one must have had a heart of stone not to have loved after such a proof of affectionate recognition.

301

FLIRTATION EXTRAORDINARY.

THERE is a fashion in everything

:

more

especially in everything feminine, as we luckless wearers of caps and petticoats are, of all other writers, bound to allow the very faults of the ladies (if ladies can have faults), as well as the terms by which those faults are distinguished, change with the changing time. The severe but honest puritan of the Commonwealth was succeeded by the less rigid, but probably less sincere prude, who, from the Restoration to George the Third's day, seems, if we may believe those truest painters of manners, the satirists and the comic poets, to have divided the realm of beauty with the fantastic coquette

1

L'Allegro reigning over one half of the female world, Il Pensieroso over the other.

With the decline of the artificial comedy, these two grand divisions amongst women,

which had given such life to the acted drama, and had added humour to the prose of Addison and point to the verse of Pope, gradually died away. The Suspicious Husband of Dr. Hoadly, one of the wittiest and most graceful of those graceful and witty pictures of manners, which have now wholly disappeared from the comic scene, is, I think, nearly the last in which the characters are so distinguished. The widereaching appellations of prude and coquette,* the recognised title, the definite classification, the outward profession were gone, whatever might be the case with the internal propensities; and the sex, somewhat weary, it may be, of finding itself called by two names, neither of them very desirable, the one being very disagreeable and the other a little naughty, branched off into innumerable sects, with all manner of divisions and sub-divisions, and has contrived to exhibit during the last sixty or seventy years as great a variety of humours,

* Perhaps flirt may be held to be no bad substitute : Yes! flirt and coquette may pass for synonymous. But under what class of women of this world shall we find the prude? The very species seems extinct.