Wortley remarks, "marriage is like a country dance, in which hands are all jumbled together, to come right in Heaven at last." The enigma of this one particular match was settled in a much less philosophical way by the ladies of Chatfield, who all agreed, as they met to propose charitable deeds in the Dorcas Benevolent Society, that Mrs. Simcox must have made the offer herself;-a conclusion the more readily attained, that Mrs. Simcox had passed the foolish, fluttering age, when young ladies draw back, and look simple, and was in the full blaze of experienced authorship, though, as yet, the public, proverbially ungrateful, had not done justice to her merits.

Every one knows that it was not until after the last peace that ladies generally began to come forward as literary characters. A certain popular critique in the Edinburgh Review first asserted their rights to be learned if they chose. Mrs. Simcox had not caught the universal epidemic, a thirst for distinction, either in prose or verse, until nearly the middle period of life. Then a sudden dream of celebrity opened before her. I think it must be the Annuals which call forth such

blossoms of genius in the present day. Female wit sprouts out with the crocus, and is published to the world with the Michaelmas daisy. Happily, these periodicals have delivered the lettered world of a dreadful infliction in the shape of manuscript authors, which are the greatest tax upon society imaginable ;—excepting that race who print, and privately circulate their works, to the great downfal of sincerity, who is put out of countenance on such occasions.

Mrs. Simcox, after a long confidential flirtation with the muses, and after a due series of "Odes to Spring," "Odes to Memory," "Odes to Forgetfulness," and "Odes to Captain Simcox," took a higher flight, rose to philosophy, descended again to fiction, fiction so interwoven with philosophy and well-meant instruction as to resemble those useful medicines which are mingled with honey to cajole one into one's own benefit ;-the sweet and the drug entering your physical and your moral frame at the same time. But to close this digression. At present, it seemed uncertain whether moral philosophy or Mrs. Taggart were the strongest in Chatfield. There was a hard struggle among the Taggart party

VOL. I.

to make reading unfashionable.

Hitherto, no

persons had acted more fully up to their precepts than hosts of ladies, married and unmarried, who had left off their literary pursuits with Mrs. Chapone, neatly bound, (as she always is,) and laid upon their drawing-room tables. But Mrs. Simcox had arrived to teach them some

thing better, to enlarge their minds, and to shew them the full expansion of female powers, and to order her own works into the Book Society.

Unconscious of the feuds which letting in light upon the unenlightened sometimes stirs up, Lady Annabetta, having vague floating notions in her head about Miss Edgeworth, Miss Porter, Mrs. Opie, and Miss Seward, and thinking that Mrs. Simcox must be something like one of these ladies, bought her book, laid it on the table, and never thought of it again, until, stimulated by Florence, she invited the authoress to tea, having made Jeffries cut up some fifty pages first, and persuaded Florence to dip into it, and to see what it was about. But before we proceed to the teaparty, it will be necessary to give a short sketch of the usual visitants at the hall, of past events, and of future probabilities.

CHAPTER III.

"Fair and lovely as thou art,

Thou has stown my very heart."

BURNS.

THE feminine gender had hitherto prevailed in the society usually admitted at Grinstead Hall; still, there were occasional male visitors, and those happened to be bachelors. Major De Grey and Lady Annabetta had relations and connexions, as all the rest of the world have; but these, with one exception, were rarely invited to Grinstead. Had it not been for her acquaintance with two young gentlemen of very dissimilar characters and destinations, the fair young Florence must have been condemned to fall in love with her dancing master, if falling in love be the inevitable destiny of woman;-which seems very hard, especially if she have no better object

than (to begin with one of my descriptions) the Reverend Walter Horn. He was vicar of the parish of Grinstead, as his father had been before him. From his birth upwards having been always accounted a "good boy,"— that is, a creature who does not fulfil his destiny, which is, to be, like other boys, violent, headstrong, and disagreeable, until the spirit of evil is crushed within them, (if that ever is,)—having borne this remarkable character, Walter, several years older than Miss De Grey, was sent for from the vicarage to play with her on rainy days, be "goose" to her "fox," to let her catch him at blind man's buff, or beat him at draughts; all of which his nature took to very kindly, for he was an amiable, meek creature, rather "soft," as the Derbyshire people say, and one who would never do any body any harm. He was nurtured under such an hereditary veneration for the house of De Grey, that to think of contradicting or disobeying Miss Florence was an idea that never intruded into his, not very discursive, imagination. He went away, with all his provincial prejudices, to college, and came back again, to be