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believed him all she said, and saw all that in him.

"And why," gasped he, with a sudden revelation, "why should I not try to be all that she thinks me? Why should I let that be ideal which I can make real ?" And he vowed a vow, and rose to the very height which she had imaged.

To return to a word introduced by me near the commencement of a paragraph on the preceding page-spooney. I used that word to protest against its use. Formerly, we were noble enough to talk about love, and not to hide our affections. A man when he was fairly in love, satisfactorily to himself, walked about, says William Shakspere, "like one of the lions." Chest out, limbs stretched, and a noble savour of conscious strength about him; but now-a-days a popular novelist has made one of his characters sneak off to church and meet his bride round a corner, and do so to the joy and applause of his readers. And so we come to the participle "spooning." "Are you going to the Zoo? You will see young Smith there; he's awful spoons on Miss Jones." Grant me patience, just heaven! but of all the abominable cants which are canted in this canting world, though the cant of criticism may be the worst, yet this cant of fashionable slang is the most offensive. You see I have altered Sterne a little, and 'tis a bold thing to alter a word of that great master of language. But it applies, and will stick.

Fall in love, then, by all means, but don't "spoon "; that is, if you are not next door to a fool. If you are going to choose one upon whom your own happiness, your children's health, your own goodness, and it may be the happiness of your soul depends, for the sake of all that in this light age you hold sacred, don't "spoon." Words are things, and really mean more; yea, all are more true than they seem. Some people do spoon. They flirt with Lucy, Chloe, Lalage, Merope, Artemisia, Lesbia, and Fanny, each of whom marks well her man, and hates the drawling coxcomb as he flirts. The miserable wretch limping about a drawing-room in his sticking-plaister boots, fancies that they admire his wit, and are relating something to his advantage when they "talk him over." Fond delusion, they are comparing notes, and laughing at his conceit, and despising him in their hearts that he is so foolish. But had he been truly in love with one, they would only have thought him noble and good. Spooning suits but fools and knaves, and such cattle are not fit for honest lovers to associate with. Yet we want a word to express the manner in which some people fall in love, not listening to the language of the heart, and having

none in the brain whereto to listen. Such persons are placed in the position-such a position-that they must flirt with a young person. "Tis done, for the language of simulation is easily learned, and that kind of lying is an easy occupation. Then after a small innings at this, the young lady begins to think that it is serious, and the friends whisper, and the father writes to ask his intentions, while the Lothario-anything but gallant and gay-is caught and netted after a very short struggle. So a marriage is made quite à la mode, and as sure to end unhappily as the sun is to go and visit the other hemisphere during that part of eternity which we call to-night, and the couple may well be said to have spooned away the most precious

chance in life.

Some men, and many women-for they hold their hearts from a custom in the sex, with much more circumspection than we do oursnever fall in love, but all those who do can, I think, do so wisely. One is not always shot through the pin of the heart by the arrow of a white wench's black eyes suddenly and without notice. Observation, acuteness, sensitiveness, pride, and even self-love, or its elder and more serious brother, self-respect, should be brought to bear. How many grave doctors have written books telling us how to take care of our digestions, to keep our skins clear and our pores open, and yet how few have given any directions about the heart. Is there any one who will tell us how to detect our hearts, when they love only a shadow the ideal we have formed, for that is the cause of the unhappiness of thousands of women? Is there any one who will teach the young man how to fix his foolish fancies not on the mere outside, but on the heart? Is there no lay preacher who will laugh away the shamefacedness which drives men to late marriages, and bids the heart lie fallow for so long that weeds of base desires occupy the ground? Is there no one who will do all this? Noble Sir Walter Raleigh, writing from his last sad prison to his son, gave this advice:-" Let thy love especially be to the best, and to her only; but take heed that thou love God, thy country, thy prince, and thine own estate before all others for the fancies of men change, and he that loves to-day hateth to-morrow; but let reason be thy schoolmistress, which shall ever guide thy love aright.”

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In the Season.

BY EDMUND YATES.

Is the Season in Hyde Park. It is half-past six o'clock, and the Row is fairly filled, though nothing like so crammed as it is before luncheon, but the Ring is full. "The next place of resort," says the "Spectator," "wherein the servile world are let loose, is at the entrance of Hyde Park, while the gentry are in the Ring." Here, gathered at the end of the Row, lounging on their horses, gliding in and out among the equestrian throng, are half the celebrities and notorieties of London. Peers of the realm, members of the House of Commons, judges, barristers, plutocrats from the City, clerks from the West End Government offices, a well-known author or journalist, a well-known horse-dealer, trying to look as if he were not "giving a show" of the horse he is riding, for the benefit of all the bystanders. See the thick, apparently impervious, knot of equestrians gathered together at the entrance of the Row, and cynically scrutinizing all the occupants of the carriages which run in triple file, are pacing between Hyde Park Corner and the Barracks. Here they come ! First, the perfectly-appointed barouche of the Duchess of Pendragon, with its silver-wigged coachman and its powdered footman, and its splendid freight; her Grace herself, still the handsomest woman in London, and her daughters, the Ladies Blanche and Clara Camelot, capital types of Saxon beauty—

"Fair-haired and ruddy as a winter's morn."

Closely following is a cabriolet, a little overdone in the smallness of its groom, and the largeness of its horse, in the excess of silver on the harness, and the amount of dye on the moustache of its driver. Mo' Davis, none but he! Eighty per cent. man, grinder of the faces of orphans, and swallower-up of widows' houses! Mo' Davis ! if you could see through those ill-fitting lavender kid gloves with which he holds the reins, you would find hands dirty and nails black with grubbing up the discount off dirty jobs! He tries to get himself up like the Emperor of the French, and to a certain extent succeeds, facially; morally, he lacks pluck, and is, consequently, far behind his illustrious prototype. Room now for Madame Gallipulos! very gorgeous indeed, and very anxious to have her gorgeosity noticed by people of rank.

Mr. Gallipulos is a Greek merchant in the City, and Madame Gallipulos, of Westbourne Terrace, is very anxious to get into what people call "society." So, having plenty of money, she gives balls, and subscribes to concerts and charitable entertainments, and when she does catch a suitable "swell," is ready to lick the dust off his or her feet. Even now she keeps glancing backward over her carriage, on the lookout for a bow of recognition from the grande dame in the barouche immediately succeeding hers—no less a grande dame than the Marchioness of Carabbas.

Very beautiful is the Marchioness of Carabbas, no mistake about her birth and breeding, as she lies back in the carriage to show her Grecian profile and her classic head, with its tightly-bound brown hair, to the best advantage. Rank, wealth, position-everything has the Marchioness of Carabbas! Everything? Well, not perhaps everything; not perhaps enough of the attention or society of the Marquis of Carabbas-an amiable enthusiast who believes that his mission in life is to convert the Jews to Protestantism, and the greater portion of whose time is spent between Houndsditch and Exeter Hall. The Marchioness of Carabbas is never, figuratively speaking, out of Madame Gallipulos' mouth; the great lady has taken so many tickets for concerts, has held so many stalls at bazaars, has engaged so many private boxes at amateur performances, where Curly Thorold, of the First, looked "so charming," and where Jack Bompas, of the Blues, was so ridiculous"-all for the furtherance of the conversion of the Jews-that she has a claim which Lady Carabbas, by reason of the orders of her lord, is compelled to acknowledge. But she gives as little as she can for the money, and the movement of a quarter of an inch of neck is all Madame Gallipulos receives when she encounters her ladyship in the Ladies' Mile, which is a convertible term, and now applies to the drive between Apsley House and the Queen's Gate, but which in its time has been applied to the northern bank of the Serpentine, and, before that, to the space between Hyde Park Corner and Cumberland Gate, where the Marble Arch now stands.

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Beginning to be a fogey, one looks back through a long vista of years to the time when, fresh from German studentship, I was first initiated into the glories of the Ladies' Mile; when Lady Blessington in the evening of a beauty so soft and charming, as to give one an idea of the resplendent loveliness of its dawn, drove in a very noticeable carriage, with the largest of footmen in the most striking of liveries; when Count D'Orsay, with his shirt-wristbands

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