that might lead to such a result. A sense of shame is so inherent in the female heart, in which Providence, for its own wise purposes, has implanted it, that it often operates in enabling women successfully to combat and overcome a passion that might have triumphed over virtue. You may remember it is recorded that when suicides became so frequent among our sex, that numbers were every day committed, the only effectual mode found for arresting them, was by the enactment of a law, decreeing, that the persons of all women guilty of this fearful crime were to be publicly exposed. The sense of modesty and shame, stronger than the fear of death in woman's heart, stopped the mania. Are not the trials you alluded to, Caroline, a more shocking exposure? and may we not believe them to be an equally salutary preventive of crime?"

"But do you not think, aunt, that a hus

band ought to shew some lenity to his wife, though she may have erred?"

"Why, surely, you could not expect a man of honour to sit tamely down with a wife who had violated hers? By so doing, he would become the tacit sanctioner of her guilt, and permit her pernicious example to sully the morals of his children."

"Will the exposure of her crime, with all its loathsome details, serve to preserve their morals, aunt?"

"Guilt punished is always less dangerous, as an example, than guilt tolerated."

"Casuists might pronounce otherwise,

aunt."

"I am no casuist, and wish you were less of one. But I repeat, that you have imbibed most erroneous opinions-all that you have now been stating is so wholly in contradic

tion to English feelings and notions, that I must again assert, that I consider you a very ineligible companion for so young and inexperienced a person as Lady Annandale."

I give you this stupid dialogue between my aunt and me, that you may enter into some of the peculiar characteristics of the English; one of which is, to believe themselves the most moral people in the world, while society teems with scandalous anecdotes, which, if only a quarter of them are true, would prove some portion of the upper classes to be the least moral in the world. Mr. So-and-So is openly talked of as the lover of Lady So-andSo, and invited wherever she visits. Many mothers would not hesitate to let her chaperon their daughters, and, if spoken to on the subject, would answer,-" Oh, yes, it is perfectly true; people do say very shocking things

about poor Lady So-and-So; but everybody receives her, and she gives such pleasant parties, and is such a nice person."

My dear compatriots are content to display their pretensions to morality, by censuring all who depart from its rules, rather than by an adherence to those rules themselves. And, having censured, they, like good mothers, receive back to their bosoms the children they have whipped, but not amended. Enough, however, of the English, en masse, for the present.

Now, for my friend Lady Annandale, who is the strangest person imaginable. Only fancy, she has taken it into her eccentric little head to conceive quite a passion for a pale sickly child of her husband's, eighteen months old; and as disagreeable as all children are at that age. Le mari, pauvre homme, seems quite flattered, though not a little embêté, by this caprice of his wife's; which, with the usual vanity

peculiar to his sex, he attributes to her affection for him. She spends whole hours playing with and caressing this unhealthy little thing, and never seems so happy as when in its company. The evening I arrived, I found a chosen few of the élite of Annandale's friends were to dine here; but, judge of my agreeable surprise, when I saw the comtesse, notre comtesse, of Hohenlinden, enter. I had not written to apprise her of my intention of coming, so that she was as much surprised at the rencontre as I was. It was the first time of her seeing Lady Annandale; and she positively stood immovable for a minute, so much was she struck by her extraordinary loveliness. If I can judge by the human countenance of what is passing within, I should say she was more astonished than delighted at the blaze of beauty that broke upon her; though she quickly recovered her presence d'esprit, and,