thy, I have not happened to witness. She seemed scarcely aware of our presence, except it were by placing herself as far as was possible from the annoyance of our odious conversation. The circumstances of her loss are now forgotten; at that time they were known to a large circle in Bath and London; and I violate no confidence in reviewing them. Lord Errol had been privately intrusted by Mr. Pitt with an official secret; viz., the outline and principal details of a foreign expedition; in which, according to Mr. Pitt's original purpose, his Lordship was to have had a high command. In a moment of intoxication the Earl confided this secret to some false friend, who published the communication and its author. Upon this, the unhappy nobleman, under too keen a sense of wounded honor, and perhaps with an exaggerated notion of the evils attached to his indiscretion, destroyed himself. Months had passed since that calamity, when we met his widow; but time appeared to have done nothing in mitigating her sorrow. The younger lady, on the other hand, who was Lady Errol's sister, Heavens! what a spirit of joy and festal pleasure radiated from her eyes, her step, her voice, her manner! She was Irish; and the very impersonation of innocent gaiety, such as we find oftener amongst Irish women than those of any other country. Mourning, I have said, she wore; from sisterly consideration, the deepest mourning; that sole expression there was about her of gloom or solemn feeling,—

But all things else about her drawn,

From May-time and the cheerful dawn.

Odious blue-stocking of Belfast and Dublin! how I hated you up to that moment! half an hour after how grateful I felt for the hostility which had procured me such an alliOne minute sufficed to put the quick-witted young

ance.

Irishwoman in possession of our little drama, and the several parts we were playing. To look was to understand, to wish was to execute, with this ardent child of nature. Like Spenser's Bradamant, with martial scorn, she couched her lance on the side of the party suffering wrong. Her rank, as sister-in-law to the Constable of Scotland, gave her some advantage for winning a favorable audience; and throwing her ægis over me, she extended that benefit to myself. Road was now made per force for me also; my replies were no longer stifled in noise and laughter. Personalities were banished; literature was extensively discussed; and that is a subject which, offering little room to argument, offers the widest to eloquent display. I had immense reading; vast command of words, which somewhat diminished as ideas and doubts multiplied; and, speaking no longer to a deaf audience, but to a generous and indulgent protectress, I threw out, as from a cornucopia, my illustrative details and recollections; trivial enough perhaps, as I might now think, but the more intelligible to my present circle. It might seem too much the case of a tempestas in matula, if I were to spend any words upon the revolution which ensued; and even the word revolution is too pompous for the case. Suffice it, that I remained the lion of that company which had previously been most insultingly facetious at my expense; and the intellectual lady finally declared the air of the deck unpleasant.

Never, until this hour, had I thought of women as objects of a possible interest, or of a reverential love. I had known them either in their infirmities and their unamiable aspects, or else in those sterner relations which made them objects of ungenial and uncompanionable feelings. Now first it struck me that life might owe half its attractions and all its graces to female companionship.

Gazing, perhaps, with too earnest an admiration at this generous and spirited young daughter of Ireland, and in that way making her those acknowledgments for her goodness which I could not properly clothe in words, I was roused to a sense of my indecorum by seeing her suddenly blush. I believe that Miss Bl interpreted my admiration rightly; for she was not offended; but, on the contrary, for the rest of the day, when not attending. to her sister, conversed almost exclusively, and in a confidential way, with Lord W— and myself. The whole, in fact, of this conversation must have convinced her that I, mere boy as I was, (not quite fifteen,) could not have presumed to direct my admiration to her, a fine young woman of twenty, in any other character than that of a generous champion, and a very adroit mistress in the dazzling fence of colloquial skirmish. My admiration had, in reality, been altogether addressed to her moral qualities, her enthusiasm, her spirit, and her wit. Yet that blush, evanescent as it was, the mere possibility that I, so very a child, should have called up the most transitory sense of bashfulness or confusion upon any female cheek, first, and suddenly as with a flash of lightning, penetrating some utter darkness, illuminated to my own startled consciousness, never again to be obscured, the pure and powerful ideal of womanhood and womanly excellence. This was, in a proper sense, a revelation; it fixed a great era of change in my life; and this new-born idea, being agreeable to the uniform aspirations of my own nature that is, lofty and sublime it governed my life with great power, and with most salutary effects. Ever after, throughout the period of youth, I was jealous of my own demeanor, reserved, and awe-struck in the presence of women; reverencing often not so much them as my own ideal of woman latent in them, and seldom,

indeed, more than imperfectly developed. For I carried about with me the idea, to which rarely did I see approximation, of

A perfect woman, nobly planned,

To warn, to comfort, to command.

an

And from this day I was an altered creature, and never again was capable of the careless, irreflective mind of childhood.

Great, doubtless, is the power of each sex over the other; and greater in proportion to the original nobility of the nature. But I know not why the dominion of woman over man, so far as the contemplation of the reciprocal ideals is concerned, seems the more absolute. I know not why, also, because it contradicts what one might have supposed a priori, the female ideal, (by which much abused term I mean the philosophic maximum perfectionis) seems less earthly and gross, pointing to a possible. alliance with some higher form of purity and sanctity. And yet, according to our scriptural mythus, she was the daughter of earth and heaven, whilst man drew his parentage directly from heaven. Whence the Miltonic address,

'Daughter of God and man, accomplished Eve.'

for God in him.'

And agreeably to this conception we are told, by the same authentic oracle, that whilst man was 'formed for God only,' she, on the contrary, was formed He drew his irradiation directly from the Deity, she only by reflex communication with him. However these are curious refinements. But it is a truth of the largest value, that the dominion of woman is potent, exactly in that degree in which the nature of woman is exalted. That woman reigns despotically, never through her image as

abstracted from her actual reality, but through her ideal, which is anterior to all actual existences; that, if there were no other detection of the hollow and false basis upon which is built savage life and Mahometan life, than merely the low and abject ideal of woman essential to those forms of humanity, in that alone we should find a sufficient refutation of the shallow paradoxes devised for varnishing those hideous degenerations of man; finally, that such as woman is will man for ever be; the one sex being essentially the antipode and adequate antagonist of the other: woman cannot be other than depressed where man is not exalted. This last remark I make, that I may not, in paying my homage to the other sex, and in glorifying its possible power over ours, be confounded with those thoughtless and trivial rhetoricians, the soi-disant poets of this age, who flatter woman with a false worship; and like Lord Byron's buccaneers, hold out to them a picture of their own empire, built only upon sensual or upon shadowy excellencies. We find continually a false enthusiasm, a mere dithyrambic inebriation, on behalf of woman, put forth by modern verse-writers, expressly at the expense of the other sex, as though woman could be of porcelain whilst man was of common earthenware. Even the testimonies of Ledyard and Park are, in some sense, false, though amiable, tributes to female excellence; at least they are merely one-sided truths - aspects of one phasis, and under a peculiar angle. For, though the sexes differ characteristically; yet they never fail to reflect each other; nor can they differ as to the general amount of development; never yet was woman in one stage of elevation, and man (of the same community) in another. Thou, therefore, daughter of God and man, all potent woman! reverence thy own ideal; and, in the wildest of the homage which is paid to thee, as also in