on the stage, for she confessed the chief pleasure the theatre afforded, was to reckon up, when she came home, how many duchesses and countesses had bowed to her across the house.

A complete despot at home, her arbitrariness is so veiled by correctness of manner, and studied good breeding, that she obtains the credit of great mildness and moderation. She is said not to love her daughters, who come too near her in age, and go too much beyond her in beauty, to be forgiven; yet, like a consummate politician, she is ever laboring for their advancement. She has generally several schemes in hand, and always one scheme under another, the under plot ready to be brought forward if the principal one fails. Though she encourages pretenders, yet she is afraid to accept of a tolerable proposal, lest a better should present itself; but if the loftier hope fails, she then contrives to lure back the inferior offer. She can balance, to a nicety, in the calculation of chances, the advantages or disadvantages of a higher possibility against a lower probability.

Though she neither wants reading nor taste, her mind is never sufficiently disengaged to make her an agreeable companion. Her head is always at work, conjecturing the event of every fresh ball and every new acquaintance. She can

not even

Take her tea without a stratagem.

She set out in life with a very slender acquaintance, and clung, for a while, to one or two damaged peeresses,_who were not received by women of their own rank. But I am told, it was curious to see with what adroitness she could extricate herself from a disreputable acquaintance, when a more honorable one stepped in to fill the niche. She made her way rapidly, by insinuating to one person of note, how intimate she was with another, and to both what handsome things each said of the other. By constant attentions, petty offices, and measured flattery, she has got footing into almost every house of distinction. Her decorum is invariable. She boasts that she was never guilty of the indecency of violent passion. Poor woman! she fancies there is no violent passion but that of anger. Little does she think that ambition, vanity, the hunger of applause, a rage for being universally known, are all violent passions, however modified by discretion, or varnished by art. She suffers, too, all that "vexation of spirit " which treads on the heels of "vanity." Disappointment and jealousy poison the days devoted to pleasure. The party does not answer. The wrong people

never stay away, and the right ones never come. The guest for whom the fête is made, is sure to fail. Her party is thin, while that of her competitor overflows; or there is a plenty of dowagers, and a paucity of young men. When the costly and elaborate supper is on the table, excuses arrive; even if the supper is crowded, the daughters remain upon hands. How strikingly does she exemplify the strong expression of laboring in the fire for very vanity"; "of giving her money for that which is not bread, and her labor for that which satisfieth not"!

After spending the day at Mrs. Fentham's, I went to sup with my friends in Cavendish Square. Lady Belfield was impatient for my history of the dinner. But Sir John said, laughing, "You shall not say a word, Charles,—I can tell how it was as exactly as if I had been there. Charlotte, who has the best voice, was brought out to sing, but was placed a little behind, as her person is not quite perfect; Maria, who is the most picturesque figure, was put to attitudinize at the harp, arrayed in the costume, and assuming the fascinating graces, of Marmion's Lady Heron :

Fair was her rounded arm, as o'er

The strings her fingers flew.

Then, Charles, was the moment of peril! then, according to your favorite Milton's most incongruous image,

You took in sounds that might create a soul

Under the ribs of death.

For fear, however, that your heart of adamant should hold out against all these perilous assaults, its vulnerability was tried in other quarters. The Titian would naturally lead to Lavinia's drawings. A beautiful sketch of the lakes would be produced, with a gentle intimation, what a sweet place Westmoreland must be to live in! When you had exhausted all proper raptures on the art and on the artist, it would be recollected that, as Westmoreland was so near Scotland, you would naturally be fond of a reel. The reel of course succeeded." Then, putting himself into an attitude, and speaking theatrically, he continued

"Then universal Pan

Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance.

O no, I forget,-universal Pan could not join; but he could admire. Then all the perfections of all the nymphs burst on you in full blaze. Such a concentration of attrac

tions you never could resist! You are but a man, ana now, doubtless, a lost man." Here he stopped to finish his laugh, and I was driven reluctantly to acknowledge that his picture, though a caricature, was, notwithstanding, a resemblance.

"And so," said Sir John, "you were brought under no power of incantation by this dangerous visit. You will not be driven, like the tempted Ithacan, to tie yourself to a mast, or to flee for safety from the enchantment of these syrens." While we were at supper, with more gravity, he said, Among the various objects of ambition, there are few in life which bring less accession to its comfort, than an unceasing struggle to rise to an elevation in society very much. above the level of our own condition, without being aided by any stronger ascending power than mere vanity. Great talents, of whatever kind, have a natural tendency to rise, and to lift their possessor. The flame, in mounting, does but obey its impulse. But when there is no energy more powerful than the passion to be great, destitute of the gifts which confer greatness, the painful efforts of ambition are like water forced above its level by mechanical powers. It requires constant exertions of art, to keep up what art first set a going. Poor Mrs. Fentham's head is perpetually at work to maintain the elevation she has reached. And how little, after all, is she considered, by those on whose caresses her happiness depends! She has lost the esteem of her original circle, where she might have been respected, without gaining that of her high associates, who, though they receive her, still refuse her claims of equality. She is not considered as of their establishment; it is but toleration at best."

At Mrs. Fentham's I encountered Lady Bab Lawless, a renowned modish dowager, famous for laying siege to the heart of every distinguished man, with the united artillery of her own wit and her daughters' beauty. How many ways there are of being wrong! She was of a character diametrically opposite to that of Mrs. Fentham. She had the same end in view; but the means she used to accomplish it were of a bolder strain. Lady Bab affected no delicacy; she laughed at reserve; she had shaken hands with decorum.

She held the noisy tenor of her way

with no assumed refinement; and, so far from shielding her designs behind the mask of decency, she disdained the obsolete expedient. Her plans succeeded the more infallibly, because her frankness defeated all suspicion. A man could never divine that such gay and open assaults could have their

foundation in design, and he gave her full credit for artless simplicity, at the moment she was catching him in her toils. If she now and then had gone too far, and, by a momentary oversight or excessive levity, had betrayed too much, with infinite address she would make a crane-neck turn, and fall to discussing, not without ability, some moral or theological topic. Thus she affected to establish the character of a woman thoughtless through wit, indiscreet through simplicity, but religious on principle.

As there is no part of the appendage to a wife which I have ever more dreaded than a Machiavelian mother, I should have been deaf to wit, and blind to beauty, and dead to advances, had their united batteries been directed against me. But I had not the ambition to aspire to that honor. I was much too low a mark for her lofty aim. She had a natural antipathy to every name that could not be found in the red book. She equally shrunk from untitled opulence and indigent nobility. She knew, by instinct, if a younger son was in the room, and, by a petrifying look, checked his most distant approaches, while, with her powerful spells, she never failed to draw within her magic circle the splendid heir, and charm him to her purpose.

Highly born herself, she had early been married to a rich man of inferior rank, for the sake of a large settlement. Her plan was, that her daughters (who, by the way, are modest and estimable) should find in the man they married still higher birth than her own, and more riches than her husband's.

It was a curious speculation to compare these two friends, and to observe how much less the refined manœuvres of Mrs. Fentham answered, than the open assaults of the intrepid Lady Bab. All the intricacies and labyrinths which the former has been so skilful and so patient in weaving, have not yet enthralled one captive, while the composed effrontery, the affecting to take for granted the offer which was never meant to be made, and treating that as concluded, which was never so much as intended, drew the unconscious victim of the other into the trap, before he knew it was set; the depth of her plot consisting in not appearing to have any. It was novelty in intrigue; an originality which defied all competition, and in which no imitator has any chance of

success.

CHAPTER X.

SIR JOHN carried me, one morning, to call on Lady Denham, a dowager of fashion, who had grown old in the trammels of the world. Though she seems resolved to die in the harness, yet she piques herself on being very religious, and no one inveighs against infidelity or impiety with more pointed censure. "She has a granddaughter," said Sir John, "who lives with her, and whom she has trained to walk precisely in her own steps, and which, she thinks, is the way she should go. The girl," added he, smiling, "is well looking, and will have a handsome fortune; and I am persuaded, that, as my friend, I could procure you a good reception."

It

We were shown into her dressing room, where we found her with a book lying open before her. From a glance which I caught of the large black letter, I saw it was a Week's Preparation. This book, it seems, constantly lay open before her from breakfast till dinner, at this season. was Passion week. But as this is the room in which she sees all her morning visitors,-to none of whom is she ever denied,even at this period of retreat, she could only pick up momentary snatches of reading in the short intervals between one person bowing out, and another curtsying in. Miss Den-, ham sat by, painting flowers.

But

Sir John asked her ladyship if she would go and dine, in a family way, with Lady Belfield. She drew up, looked grave, and said with much solemnity, that she should never think of dining abroad at this holy season. Sir John said, "As we have neither cards nor company, I thought you might as well have eaten your chicken in my house as in your own." though she thought it a sin to dine with a sober family, she made herself amends for the sacrifice, by letting us see that her heart was brimful of the world, pressed down and running over. She indemnified herself for her abstinence from its diversions, by indulging in the only pleasures which she thought compatible with the sanctity of the season, uncharitable gossip and unbounded calumny. She would not touch a card for the world, but she played over to Sir John the whole game of the preceding Saturday night; told him by what a shameful inattention her partner had lost the odd trick; and that she should not have been beaten after all, had not her adversary, she verily believed, contrived to look over her hand.

Sir John seized the only minute, in which we were alone,