night?-for which of us has it not been bathed with tears of agonizing anxiety as to the future welfare of a beloved child?

As her love mingled with her fears for Agnes, a mother's voice breathed a fervent prayer to the great Director of all hearts for the happiness of her child.

Does not such an humble prayer ascend more gratefully. direct from the heart, and dictated by the feelings, to the throne of the Almighty, than the ritual which form prescribes, though clothed with all the magnificence of language, and chanted amidst the imposing solennities of sacerdotal ceremony,

Where pealing organs swell the note of praise.

CHAPTER II.

RETROSPECTION.

And now the weary traveller attains
Some towering height-at last
He rests in his career, and backward looks
O'er forests dark and lengthy plains,
At rushing torrents, babbling brooks,
Beauties and barrenness, that alike
Upon his mind with melancholy strike,
Because they are past.

ANON.

THE early history of Mrs. Fleming was that of many young women whose fashion is superior to their fortune, and whose parents rather consider the establishment than the happiness of their child. Born with all the genuine feelings of her sex, with a heart capable of loving warmly, and with ideas that marriage should be the result only of affection, she yielded up her young heart to its first impulses in favour of a person a few years older than herself, whose talents for conversation and powers of entertainment had made him a frequent and a welcome guest at her father's table.

To procure establishments for a numerous family, was the great and only ambition of her mother, Lady Mary Dornton.

It was this lady's policy, therefore, to render her dinnertable and drawing-room as attractive as gayety, talent, and entertainment, could make them; and she felt proud in the contemplation of her success, as three married daughters sometimes graced the paternal board, while the scions of many of her contemporary rival matrons yet moved on in single blessedness.

She had still, however, a daughter to dispose of; and the Honourable Mr. Dornton's declining health made her dread a circumstance which, by leaving her only in possession of a widow's jointure, would prevent the continuance of her system, and deprive them of the advantages and facilities which crowded drawing rooms and quadrilles and duets afford to young ladies and manœuvring mammas.

Lady Mary had married a younger brother, and was not like some of her contemporaries, whose fortunes enabled them to render their houses and tables attractive by the sumptuousness of their feasts, and the splendour of her entertainments; she therefore had recourse to all the talent of the day, as an attraction to counterbalance the advantage which superior fortunes gave so many of her competitors in the field of matrimonial speculation.

To have written a poem or a play, or to be celebrated for either instrumental or vocal performances, or, in short, to be celebrated for any thing, was a sure passport to the parties of Lady Mary Dornton.

She had sufficient taste and discrimination herself to feel the superiority of intellectual over merely sensual gratification : she felt that the wit which presided as the tutelar deity of her own dinners, rendered them superior in attraction to the wines which sparkled in such expensive variety at those of others; and she herself paid a tribute to this superiority by her own enjoyment of the "feast of reason and the flow of soul" which she provided for others. But, alas! she forgot that these very means were perpetual impediments in the way of her own success, by showing the superiority of talent over rank and fortune. She forgot that the liveliness of the pennyless wit only served to make the dulness of the man of ten thousand a year more conspicuous; not that dulness and ten thousand a year are synonymous; for there really are some people with twice this income who are very pleasant fellows and very loveable persons in spite of it.

Unfortunately for Lady Mary's system, when the wit and observation of a man are sharpened by a collision with the world, in all the various states in which it is shown at sessions, and assizes, and in the King's Bench and Common Pleas, and the numberless other scenes in which active talent is employed, together with the perpetual exercise of ingenuity and eloquence,-it generally makes the younger brother who is brought up to the bar, a pleasanter fellow and a more agreeable lover than the elder one who is brought up to the estate.

But younger brothers were not Lady Mary's objects now, though she had not disdained one in her youth. They were not likely to afford establishments of sufficient consequence to provide her a periodical residence when the dreaded event we have alluded to should occur; and it was her plan that her daughter's houses should be such as would enable them to return in kind, in her old age and widowhood, that which she had done for them in their youth in short, in all their establishments, she had an eye to her own future comforts.

Unfortunately, however, her scheme, though it eventually succeeded, kept the hearts of her daughters in a perpetual state of rebellion against their interests. They could not associate with talent without feeling its influence; they could not hear soft and sweet music from the voice of one man, resplendent repartee from the lips of another, and feel a deep interest in the voyages, adventures, and "hair-breadth 'scapes' of a third, and turn round and bestow their admiration and affection upon one who was perhaps looking only with envy upon these qualifications without possessing any of them. and whose only claim to admiration was a title or an estate unencumbered by any thing but his own dulness and stupidity.

Yet this was precisely what lady Mary wished and expected her daughters to do; and consequently there was not one of them married to the man whom her own heart would have preferred, had it been left free and unbiassed in its choice.

It has often struck us that the heads of a family are not justified in the admission of any person into the intimate society of their children, to whom, should an attachment occur, there would be any decided objection. They should recollect that young hearts do not discriminate like old heads, and should be careful how they introduce talent, cheerfulness, and pleasantry, united with youth and perhaps personal attraction, while their possessors are persons to whom they would object

as nusbands for their daughters. Yet of this imprudence how many parents are guilty! They themselves are pleased merely with the talent which excites in them only admiration; and they seem to forget that in younger minds and hearts this sensation is too likely to be accompanied by softer feelings, which may give a colour to future existence.

Happily for all but Mrs. Fleming, they were possessed of hearts which soon gratefully acknowledged the prudence of their mother, and which soon forgot their early predilections. in favour of sentiment, in the contemplation and enjoyment of equipage and splendour.

Unluckily for Agnes, the subject of our present episode and the mother of our heroines, her heart was more deeply susceptible of its first impressions. She could not love and forget; her feelings once aroused, she could not find a Lethean draught either in pleasure or in splendour to bury the remembrance of them in oblivion. Oh what a happy art is forgetfulness! from how many pangs does it save us! how many a heart has it prevented from breaking! and to how many minds has it restored peace and tranquillity!

Among those who were frequent and welcome guests at the table and in the drawing-room of Lady Mary Dornton, was Augustus Clifton. He had just quitted college, and had commenced his literary career by a poem, which had given notoriety to his name, and which of course became a visiting ticket to parties where talent was the passport for admittance.

But Clifton was not a hackneyed poet. His production was that of impulse rather than of education. He had portrayed the passions, not as he had read of them, but as he felt them growing up in his own heart. He was a poet by nature, and all nature appeared to his young and unsullied imagination but as a beautiful poem ;-he considered all his undefined longings, all his incipient passions, only as so many legitimate passports to enjoyment. He had indeed the mind of a true poet-he looked at every thing abstractedly-he loved nature --he loved the world, and called it a beautiful world, because all things seemed to conspire to his wishes. He loved fame too, and wished to live in futurity-he could not bear that with his life his name should pass away-he wished that it might be enrolled among the master spirits of poetry in the Abbey-he wished posterity to read it recorded with those from whose works he quoted so frequently and so aptly-he could not bear that

He should be left, forgotten in the dust,
When fate, relenting, lets the flower revive.

One vigorous effort of a young mind had gained him a celebrity which he was inexperienced enough to suppose would stand him in the stead of rank and fortune; he imagined the caresses and the invitations he received on all hands to be the permanent result of respect for his talents, instead of the evanescent feeling which would last only so long as he could afford entertainment. He believed the professions of assistance which he received to be sincere, and imagined that he saw a hand ready to help him up every step of the ladder of fame, and that fortune waited to welcome him at the top of it.

He was yet to learn that selfish vanity was the groundwork of all the kindness he received, and that the moment his presence ceased to gratify this passion in his admirers, they would cease to remember that he existed.

He little thought that his patrons of the moment would treat him as they did their champagne, enjoy its sparkling qualities, and dash aside the bottle which contained them the moment they ceased to exhilarate.

Unfortunately for poor Mrs. Fleming, at the moment of Clifton's first introduction, her mother's mind was so intensely occupied with her manœuvres to make her third daughter the lady of a young baronet who had succeeded to an estate of seven thousand a year, that she was permitted unmolested to form her own little coteries in the drawing-room, to secure the arm and the companionship of the one she liked best to the dinner-table, and was allowed sufficient leisure to see and appreciate the talent which was considered by her mother only as an appendage to her party.

There was an artless buoyancy in the conversation of Augustus that rendered it quite unlike that of the hackneyed diner-out and that of the professed wits, who appeared made up for the occasion; and Agnes thought she perceived under all his brilliancy, a goodness of heart and a generosity of nature which she had herself sense and heart enough to appreciate far beyond the qualities which merely afforded entertainment. There was likewise that congeniality of disposition and sentiment so often existing between young, lively, and virtuous minds at their first entrance into the world, which drew them together. She found in his conver