her darling pales for a moment, to whose ear a cough is a knell-and who at dead of night steals from her warm couch, not merely to 'watch the stars out by the bed of pain;' (the less earthly mother will do that,) but to torture herself with fancying fever in the warm glow of health, perhaps even to disturbing, by the very anxiety meant to protect.

The memory of such a mother bending over our little beds with 'dewy looks of love,' is one of the most passionate and haunting when in arid after years, we wake to real suffering of mind or body, and find none watching, and hear no voice of comfort, and feel no kiss of unutterable love; and so on, through life, even when we are no longer of an age to hear as a child, to see as a child,' but when it is indeed time to put away childish things,' how the heart clings to the mother, whose eye kindles, and whose cheek burns at our wrongs, (fancied or real), who glories even in her daughter's silly triumphs, her vanities and her conquests over

'fellow worms;' yea, takes a pride in every new ball dress and new admirer.

Blind guides leading the blind;' the gentle hand that in infancy takes a pride in fixing in our hats or caps the gay cockades which, to the thinking, are perhaps the colors of Belial, or the badges of Mammon, is dearer than that which wisely plucks away, with a gentle firmness anything that savours of the livery of vanity, and the fingers that are never weary of training our silky tresses into graceful curls, are lovelier even to our memories than those which calmly sever the useless ornaments from the empty head, or neatly and hastily braid them away, as things too paltry to matter to one who has to win and wear the helmet of righteousness and the shield of faith-and so on throughout the weak indulgences, which it is such pleasure to bestow, and such virtue to refuse! how even the recollection of them binds wise and strong men to the fond and feeble mother, long gone down to the grave!

Who does not sympathize with Cowper's passionate tribute to her, whose very weaknesses he has clothed with so beguiling and immortal a charm.

Thy nightly visits to my chamber made,

That thou might'st know me safe and warmly laid,
Thy morning bounties ere I left my home,
The biscuit, or confectionary plum;

The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed

By thine own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed.

Ah, how much of woman's weak indulgence of her own fond heart, does even the pious Cowper immortalize in this most exquisite of his poems: "The nightly visit," "The fragrant waters," "The Biscuit or confectionary

plum." The weak indulgence, not the wise denial.

But Johnson! even Johnson, he too hesitates not to declare, that he should never have loved or mourned his mother as he had done, had she not in his childhood indulged his appetite beyond what was reasonable, and allowed

him coffee and other dainties which she could ill afford, and which it would have been much wiser to have denied.

With the most devout of poets, and with "the Colossus of Literature" on their sides, who shall blame weak woman for indulging the very foibles which, as we have too clearly proved, attach even the strongest? Who shall, marvel that Mrs. Orde was all the dearer, even to the most lofty-minded of her daughters, for her maternal indignation at the mortifying inuendoes of the cat-like aunt, whose patte de velours scarcely concealed the sharp and ready claws! who shall marvel that none blamed as she built her airy castles on no better foundation than vanity and vengeance, and that if Rosalie eagerly tried to shield poor guiltless Gerard Esdaile from her mother's ill deserved anger and contempt, the effort was owing not to evenhanded justice, but to a one sided partiality— else poor young Moody would have shared in her eloquent endeavours to justify the innocent,

and that was very far from being the case. Nay, as it was, the young fox-hunter, who had ever seemed disposed to bestow on Rosalie, whatever time and attentions he could spare from his dogs, his horses and his chief cronies the whippers in of the Hunt, so it was the ungrateful girl herself, who was most anxious to do away with any impression that his visits had any particular object, or that he had presumed to raise his eyes to one who so entirely despised him, his tastes, habits and pursuits.

What a pity that from all time Dan Cupid has ever been at cross-purposes, the juice of "the little western flower, purple with love's wound" is in every love philtre and plays as wild work now, as it did with Helena and Hermia, Demetrius and Lysander, Titania and He of the Ass's Head.

Yes, it was to Jeannetta Orde that Gerard raised his eyes as to the load-star of his very soul. It was her face which made