give rather an amusing account. They were written by Thomas Coke, Lord Lovell, afterwards Earl of Leicester, whose singular character has been inimitably drawn by Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, in his poem, entitled "Isabella, or the Morning;" in which he describes the circle of admirers of the Duchess of Manchester :- "But, hark! a louder knock than all before- Into the room see sweating Lovell break !- the court of Turin. "Holkbam, Dec. 31, 1735. MY DEAREST LORD, "La Roche's present, by being the occasion of my hearing from you, afforded me as great pleasure as the present itself (though very agreeable and fit for my new house) will do. You have opened my wounds by speaking of Lady Fanny. She is quite lost to me: that foul fiend Chesterfield has bewitched her; and, under pretence of serving me, has entirely defeated me, and is in full possession of the lady's soul. In the inclosed, which I beg you'll deliver, I have eased my heart a little to La Roche, and told him of my misery. For since my secret is like never to be any secret at all, I find great ease in discoursing of it, and tiring all my acquaintance with my grief. My rival triumphs so publicly that I hear of nothing from London but his success. All summer, parties by water, rides in Bushy Park, &c.; and the old ladies begin to be censorious; which the nice lady, however, stands, and, since she herself knows there is no harm, does not mind what others say. This plaguy peace, that is like to unhinge the measures of the seditious, and make them have nothing to do, will give Chesterfield still more time to love. I cannot bear London while things continue thus, though I must be there in about three weeks. I hear, from true judges, + William (Capel), third Earl of Essex, K.G. MY DEAR ESSEX, That "I have this moment received "Your friend, his Grace of Newcas- + The post-office. Lord Lovell was at this time postmaster-general. Thomas (Pelham Holles), Duke of Newcastle, for so many years the incapable minister of this country. * degrave, some by you, and, though Your most faithful Madam, I hear that you were at the playYou did not say one word on't yesterday. I went, who'd no engagement anywhere, There's nothing upon earth so hard to me n'ral cried. Ay.fortune de la guerre,' my lord replied. 'But you and I, Charles, hardly find things so, As we both did some twenty years ago.' And take off twenty years,' replied her grace; ''Twould do no harm to Lady Fanny's face. My lord, you never see her but at night, By th' advantageous help of candlelight; Dress'd out with ev'ry aid that is adorning:Oh, if your lordship saw her in the morning! It is no more that Fanny once so fair: No roses bloom, no lilies flourish there; But hollow eyes, and pale and faded cheek, Repentance, love, and disappointment speak.' How long Lady Fanny continued to exhibit her waning charms to the unsparing criticism of her female friends, or, in other words, how long her intimacy with Lord Chesterfield endured, does not exactly appear. All that we know with certainty is, that she lived long enough to repent of her errors, whatever they may have been. mentioned by Horace Walpole in "The Twickenham Register," written about the year 1758, as residing there, and occupied in a life of devotion. Here Fanny, ever blooming fair, Ejaculates the gracefu. prayer; She is And, 'scaped from sense, with nonsense smit, For Whitfield's cant leaves Stanhope's wit. Lady Fanny had retired from the world, and adopted the religious tenets of the celebrated Whitfield; and, in spite of the sneer contained in the above lines, there is no reason to doubt of the To the Opera. Were many people there? sincerity or the soundness of her repen The duchess cried. Yes, madam, a great • Lord Waldegrave was now ambassador at Paris. + Richard (Lumley), second Earl of Scarborough. He killed himself in 1740, in conse. quence, as it is said, of having betrayed a state secret to the Duchess of Manchester, for which he was reproached by Sir Robert Walpole. The preceding passage in the text is rather interesting, as giving a picture of society nearly one hundred years ago. The originals of these letters are preserved in the MS collection of the Earl of Essex. General Churchill, the lover of the celebrated Mrs. Oldfield. Charles Stanhope. ++ Richard Bateman, the brother of Viscount Bateman. He is said to have been the person who first introduced the plant of mignionette into England. was tance: but " Strawberry Horace clearly no fit judge of such matters. Besides, at the time he wrote, the very name of Whitfield and methodism was a by-word for ridicule; as Cowper, writing a few years later, has so forcibly pointed out, in his beautiful character of that ecclesiastic.* Those days of prejudice are now happily passed away, and we are enabled to view Whitfield as he really was-an able and truly religious teacher of the word of God, according to the doctrines he professed. Lady Fanny Shirley continued to her death in the practice of piety, and in the enjoyment of a religious course of life; possessing thus, in the end of her Those well-known lines in the poem of "Hope," beginning with Leuconomus (beneath well-sounding Greek, I slur a name a poet must not speak, days, that tranquil happiness, to which in her earlier course she must have been a stranger. Far other was the evening of Lord Chesterfield's career. He remained to the last not only a seeker after the vanities of the world, but also after the youth which he had lost. He occupied himself in a constant but wretched endeavour to be more young and more frivolous than was becoming his age and character. "He lived at White's gaming, and pronouncing witticisms among the boys of quality*." The consequence was, as we find from his own letters, both published and unpublished, that his old age was one of fretfulness and disappointment. He was always attempting to keep up his former reputation, and he constantly found it sinking under him; for the liveliness and frivolity which is graceful in youth becomes disagreeable and contemptible in older life. He had never read, or, at least, had never put to heart as he ought, the admirable advice of PopeLearn to grow old, or fairly make your willYou've eat, and drank, and loved, and laugh'd your fill; Walk sober off before a sprightlier age Leave those to trifle with more grace and ease, So far was Lord Chesterfield from profiting by these lines that he went on drinking a life of folly to the dregs, laughed at by the young, pitied by the old, and, finally, when he died, unregretted and unlamented. Of his old age, the best picture is the one given of that of General Churchill by Sir Charles Hanbury Williamst, than which, undoubtedly, nothing can be well conceived more hopelessly miserable : His old desire to please is still express'd; wears, And in the boxes with the beaux appears; His eyes through wrinkled corners cast their rays, Still he bows graceful, still soft things he says; In looking over the poetry, we cannot compliment the Editor on the lines bearing his name; we have seldom met with any thing so dull and unintelligible. There are, however, some clever specimens of versification, and here is one of the best : • Memoirs of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford In the poem of Isabella, or the Morning.' THE RETURN. BY MISS L. E. LANDON, Nintz is a fair city, but it seemed the very fairest in the world to the traveller, for he h-4 been absent years; he left it poor, but he came back rich; and the home of his youth was again to be the home of his age. "DROP down your oars, the waters trace Than now I see those walls again. Then judges but by what it feels. Which but to seek is to possess. Has passed as many men's have past; Are those which never wealth could buy. "Affection's cirele soon grows less The dead, the changed, what blanks are there ! And what avails half life's success, No early friends can see and share? The grasp of some familiar hand; We have made a powerfully written Cornish tale, by Mr. Carne, from this Annual, the subject of an illustration. in our ordinary number, and give herewith its conclusion. THE DEAD AND THE LIVING Concluded from p. 420. The husband could endure no longer, and strove to lead her away; but she passionately refused, saying, that they had been parted twelve years-that the grave had been made to forsake its prey, and should she forsake it? And then she spoke wildly and hurriedly, as if addressing him—that his aged mother had died of grief that their infant child, that she had borne after his loss -then she rose suddenly, and rushed from the apartment. The friends and relatives, and the rest of the people who had looked on in strange surprise, and even horror, strove to prevent her design, and entreated her not to persist in it. But the mother was awake; and neither bars, nor bolts, nor armed men, could withstand her power in this moment. She drew with her into the chamber her only child, a girl of nearly ten years of age, and pointing to the body, made her kneel beside it, and said it was her father! The child shrieked and drew back, and refused to put its hand into the cold one of the dead, or to press her lips to his. The second husband was the only father she ever knew, and what was the lost to her? nothing but a fearful and ghastly object; she would not love or embrace it, she said. But "the worms were not around it;" he could not say to them "thou art my mother and my sister." What a world of meaning is in this! We cannot know, perhaps, for we have never been tried, with what fondness, what ardour, we should hang over them we have loved and lost, if decay never came there; would the husband turn away from the wife of his youth, if the parting smile and look still slept on her face, and the beauty of that face fell not, and knew no change? Would the mother not lie down beside her lost one, and press the cold but imperishable form to her breast, as if life and joy could wake there again! So felt, no doubt, the tried and agonized woman. "Just as he fell!-O God! just as he fell!" she murmured, as her thoughts fled back to the vale by the sea, where they had lived so happily, till the morn when he dreamed of death ere it came, and took a sad and kind farewell of her, as if a foreboding even then was on his mind. And now the husband sternly interposed, and said that he would endure no longer; that for years he had striven to sooth her mind and chase away the gloomy remembrances of her loss, and the dreadful manner of it; and now the wound was opened afresh, and would never close; and the kindness of the living would be lost in the woman's heart in the love of the dead. They looked on him, and saw that his mind was greatly troubled, and that his passions were roused. Strange that jealousy of the dead should thus enter into the mind of the living. He stooped and spoke some words to her as she knelt, that were not heard by those aronnd; they seemed to move her strongly for the moment; for she looked wistfully in his face, the expression of which was sad and menacing; then she rose slowly, took her child by the hand, and left the apartment. Her relatives saw there was no time to be lost; that to leave the unperished form of her first husband beneath her roof would only sow dissension and useless sorrow; that it could not and must not be. What had he to do in this breathing and busy world? Why was he thus cast forth, after his time, when the wife could not claim, and the child would not own him? With all care and reverence, they removed the body to an upper chamber, where the same attentions and duties were given as if he had been newly slain; but no mourners came, no one wept over him; he was so long lost as to be almost forgotten; to the second husband he had ever been a stranger. The latter, after the form was removed from his sight, as well as the misery of his wife, behaved well and calmly. After a time he spoke, in words suited to the sad occasion, to those around, and said that the remains should be treated with as much honour as if they were those of his brother. There was another trial of his temper; the wife insisted that the body should be laid in their own bed-it was the same in which she had slept with her first husband; the head rested on the same pillow. It was night when it was placed there, for many hours had now passed. He came and stood beside it a few moments in silence, but showed no emotion; her hand had strewed flowers around it, and placed lights at the head and feet; but nothing could ever induce him to sleep in that bed again. On the third day after this, Nicholas was borne to the grave, followed by his wife and child, and a great concourse of people. Andrews also followed, but not as a mourner. The deceased was buried in the parish church-yard that stood solitary on the summit of a hill at no great distance; the gray tower could be seen far off at sea, and often served the mariners as a landmark. Three years after this, Andrews died also, and was buried in the same spot, but not in the same grave. The widow was again left desolate. This desolation was, however, less bitter than the first; she no more gave way to useless repinings; the dwelling on the hill-side, that overlooked the mine, was no longer that of despair! the garden was kept carefully neat, for Nicholas had loved it, and trimmed it every day with his own hand, when he ascended from the depths of the mine and his daily toil was over. The care of her child was a sweet and endless office; and now she could tell of her father; of his strange end and stranger restoration; how fond, how kind a man he had been; how suddenly he was taken away; and how God had restored him, but for a few moments only, to comfort her; and she wept bitterly on the neck of his first-born, and the child wept also. The stern eye of the second husband was no more upon them; he slept in peace: and to his grave the widow sometimes repairedto the burial-ground on the hill-at evening; but not to his grave, at least the neighbours said so. There was another beside it, planted with flowers, and a handsome tablet over it. The children of the hamlet, who sometimes played wildly in the cemetery, and chased each other over the fresh as well as the neglected graves, never dared to tread on his, they remembered his strange finding, and they looked on it with awe. She knelt there, and the child knelt beside her; her little hands were taught to pluck every stray weed away; and she gazed in silence and love on her mother, as she prayed, with clasped hands and tears fast falling. The prayer was too deep and heartfelt for words; but the moving of the lip, the heaving of the breast, the eager, agonizing expression of the eye, appeared as if a strange and wild hope mingled with her petition to heaven. To the stranger's eye she seemed to say, "Incorruption yet on thee, my husband? Wilt thou again burst the cerements of the grave? Ten years he lay undecayed!-Surely, surely, the worm is not on thee !" She had many offers, even after this, to marry again. She was not yet more than thirty, and sorrow had not quite wasted her comeliness; but she never would listen to them, and continued to reside in the lonely dwelling on the hill side, looked upon by all as a woman with whom Heaven had dealt strangely, yet mercifully. The rude fishermen, who plied their trade near the noble cliffs just beyond, would often bring to her door their choicest fish, ere they travelled inland to seek a market. The miners, whenever she passed by the scene of their toils, paid her market respect, and looked curiously on the only child, who, as years passed away, grew to be a beautiful yet delicate girl; the women of the hamlet said how like she was to her father, yet that no good would come to her, born in such a way, and under so dark a doom. With the above selections must conclude our notice of The Keepsake,' which is as much entitled to praise as any of the preceding volumes. The next on our list is The Amulet, Edited by S. C. Hall. This elegant Annual has, for six years, maintained a high character for excellence, and it again appears with undiminished brilliancy. The pictorial display, which is rich in the extreme, may vie with those of any of its class, in point of excellence, and the literary articles are no less deserving of public favour. From among those pieces which have delighted us most, we take the following. THE RESIDUARY LEGATEE. By Miss Milford. ABOVE half a century ago-for to such a date does my little story refer-Red Lion Square was accounted a genteel, if not a fashionable, place of residence, and numbered amongst its inhabitants some of the principal London attorneys solicitor was not the phrase in those days-to whom its vicinity to the inns of court rendered that neighbourhood particularly convenient. Amongst the most respectable of these respectable persons was Mr. Mordaunt, a widower with five children, whose mingled strength and kindliness of character rendered him the very man to educate and bring out his motherless family; just as the union of acuteness and integrity, for which he was distinguished in his professional life, had placed him deservedly at the head of one of the most flourishing firms in the metropolis. He was not rich, for he had began the world with nothing but industry and talent, had married a lady in the same predicament with himself, and had preferred giving his children the inalienable possession of an excellent education to the accumulation of money for their immediate portions; but, in the prime of life, with an excellent income and still brighter prospects, he lived as became a man of liberal habits and |