permitted him to enjoy, unmolested, all the advantages of a strict incognito.

"What can we do?" asks one lady, whose doors used to fly open at his approach in the palmy days of his diplomatic splendour. "It is very embarrassing; we see so much of the present ambassador!"

She speaks the truth; her ladyship might say thus of every past, present, and future one. who gives fêtes.

"The actual people might take it amiss, were we to shew any attention to the duc."

"It really is unpleasant having the duc here at this moment," says another of his ci-devant friends.

"It betrays a want of tact under present circumstances," adds a third.

I have observed, that people who return to a place in altered circumstances are always considered to display this deficiency; and excite

much the same feeling of embarrassment in the minds of their intimates that a dear, deceased, and much-lamented friend would occasion, were he to re-appear on earth some years after those who once wept his loss had become accustomed to it, and to the possession of his property.

Each acquaintance by whom the Duc de

was fêted at no distant period, now finds some unanswerable reason for no longer embarrassing him with his attentions; and gets rid of self-reproach for their worldliness, by petulantly censuring the man he has deserted for thus injudiciously testing his past professions of friendship. Perhaps, however, some little excuse may be found for these heartless persons in the frequency of revolutions and changes on the Continent. Here it not unfrequently occurs that the ambassador who gave a fete last week, to which all the élite

of fashion flocked, is, owing to some alteration of sovereign or government, replaced this week by one of totally opposite politics, who gives his fetes also to the same individuals, and, probably, in the same house. In the mean time his predecessor shrinking into insignificance in some obscure dwelling, anxiously awaits another turn of the wheel of fortune, whose movements have of late become so rapidowing, probably, to the introduction of railroads as to baffle all calculation.

Pray, tell me what says the duc, and the Faubourg, of ces chers et bons Anglais at present? But my question, at least, as far as regards sa seigneurie, is useless; he is too comme il faut et digne to be angry, and too distrait even to remember what his good and noble heart would fain forget.

My little friend, Lady Annandale, is caught in the wily archer, Love's net, past doubt, and,

I think, past redemption. She may,

may, and probably will, struggle to extricate her heart; but, alas! woman rarely struggles successfully if once fairly caught; and, like a bird ensnared in the toils of a fowler, only entangles herself more in the meshes by her efforts to regain her freedom.

There are moments when I feel so much pity for this lovely and interesting young creature, that I could yet be capable of sacrificing my own schemes to secure her happiness. Ay, you may smile at this declaration, Delphine, knowing how I have steeled my heart against soft emotions since I became the dupe and victim of a villain. But a woman, though she may, by circumstances, be compelled to enact the rôle of philosophe, never ceases to retain one of the inherent and indigenous qualities of her sex; and that is, pity. The young expend it on others, and

the sentiment is called love; the old reserve it all for themselves, and it is named selfishness: the change is merely in the object; the principle is, even in the altered state, identical; consequently, I compassionate, and never blame, the egotists we so frequently meet with in society. Could we read the histories of their lives, and trace the events that led to this selfishness, with how many romances, more touching than all those of fiction, should we become acquainted! By how many pangs, occasioned by others, have they been tried! before closing all the portals of the heart, they endeavoured to supply the place of the expelled idols with one equally deceptive and, perhaps, equally unworthy - SELF!

While others love us, while we are necessary to their happiness, we rarely become egotists. Should we not, then, pardon those unhappy beings who, with hearts yearning with affec