This is the ape of form, monsieur the nice,
——————WHOM LADIES CALL THEIR SWEET.”
And asks, in the phrase of Marlow, if I shall suffer my cousin to live with him and be his love. No. A contract of matrimony between two females is absurd, and not good in law; for doubtless Dickey is—my aunt Peg.
A literary friend, after a lonesome journey through a boorish quarter of the country, on his arrival at an inn, exults, when the waiter informs him, that the young fellow, entering the room, “has been to college.” The conversation naturally turns upon books. Do you relish the belles lettres? Oh yes, I read Rollin’s belles lettres last winter, and liked them mightily. The indignant traveller frowned—he was unconscious that a degree in arts was frequently conferred on—my aunt Peg.
When I was at the university—I beg that the world would suppose I mean Oxford, Edinburgh, or Aberdeen, and not our college of Cambridge, for which I have singular affection—if a lad were guilty of genius, a tribunal of tasteless tutors, professors, &c., would doom him to expulsion. What, said they, a man of genius in a college? It cannot, must not be.—Why Issachar, our strong ass, couching down between his two burdens, Greek on one side, and Mathematics on the other, will bray and break, bridle at the very sight of him. Yes, says Candor, their “worships and their reverences” are, in very deed,—my aunt Peg.
Half a century since, dame France was a stately old gentlewoman, proud of her pedigree, associating with men of rank, and keeping servants at a distance. But the devil, Reform, began to haunt her house, and she insisted that the table should be laid in the cellar, instead of the parlor. Some of her refractory domestics, who disobeyed this whimsical order, she turned out of doors, hung up others to the kitchen lamp with the jack line; and at length, assisted by a cruel dog of a joiner, she fixed a butcher’s cleaver into an old box, and fairly chopped the Steward’s head off.—Not one of her rational neighbours, who witnessed those mad deeds, but went away exclaiming,—Good lack! that such a noble lady should be vilely metamorphosed into—my aunt Peg.
For sources, see the end of the second installment ([pg. 405]).
INTERESTING STORY OF MADELAINE.
BY HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS.
A Friend of mine, who is lately gone to Toulouse, has sent me from thence an account of some circumstances which happened not long ago in that part of France, and which she says are still much the subject of conversation. I shall transcribe this narrative, which I believe will interest you. Perhaps a novel-writer, by the aid of a little additional misery, and by giving the circumstances which actually happened a heightened colour—by taking his pallet, and dashing with a full glow of red what nature had only tinged with pale violet, might almost spin a volume from these materials. Yet, after all, nothing is so affecting as simplicity, and nothing so forcible as truth. I shall therefore send you the story exactly as I received it; and in such parts of it as want interest, I beg you will recollect that you are not reading a tale of fiction; and that in real life incidents are not always placed as they are in novels, so as to produce stage effect. In some parts of the narrative you will meet with a little romance; but, perhaps, you will wonder that you meet with no more; since the scene is not in the cold philosophic climate of England, but in the warm regions of the south of France, where the imagination is elevated, where the passions acquire extraordinary energy, and where the fire of poetry flashed from the harps of the Troubadours amidst the sullen gloom of the Gothic ages.