supported her. She raised herself for a mo

ment

gave one eager look towards him- a frightful convulsion passed over her features; it was very transitory-for before Beatrice, who sprang from her side to reach some essence from the table, had returned with it, her face was set in the fixed calm and the pale hues of death.

THE LAST CHAPTER.

"O, Jupiter! how weary are my spirits!"

SHAKESPEARE.

THE winding-up of a novel is like winding up a skain of silk, or casting up a sum - all the ends must be made neat, all the numbers accounted for, at last. Luckily, in the closing chapter a little explanation goes a great way; and a character, like a rule of morality, may be dismissed in a sentence.

:

Cecil Spenser married his cousin, Helen Morland it was very satisfactory to find somebody who looked up to him entirely. He repaired the beautiful old abbey, which his father had allowed to go to ruin-built a library and a picture-gallery-threw open his preserves-refused to stand for the county-and if not happy, believed he was, and in such a case belief is as good as reality. He practised what Lord Mandeville theorised, who, in despite of his con

VOL. III.

victions of the excellence and happiness of those who are

"Home dwellers on their father's land,"

accepted a foreign embassy to one of the most brilliant of the European courts, but where Lady Mandeville was the most brilliant and the most beautiful.

There is a very acute remark of Crowe's, which says," the English rather desire to extract a moral than a truth from experience." I must own they do dearly delight in a judgment; and sorry am I that I cannot gratify this laudable propensity by specifying some peculiar evil incurred by Mr. Delawarr's ambition, or Lady Etheringhame's vanity.

Adelaide neither lost her life by eating ice when warm with dancing, nor her features by the small-pox, the usual destiny of vain creatures in the days of moral essays: she went on, like Lady Macbeth,

"For I can smile, and murder while I smile,"

till the rose and the ringlet became alike artificial; and she was left to that "winter of discontent," which shared its reproaches between the maid who could no longer make,

and the mirror that could no longer reflect, a beauty.

Mr. Delawarr's life was spent in debates and dinners. Once, for a few weeks, he was in the opposition-caught cold, and decided that such a position was equally bad for his own and his country's constitution resumed, and never after resigned his post under government. He died the first and last Earl of Delawarr.

Mrs. Francis Boyne Sillery played cards. to an interminable old age; and her youthful husband died, five years after their marriage, of the jaundice. There were some on dits afloat respecting a third marriage with a "certain young writer," whose hymns had converted every old lady in Bath; but it never took place.

The respectable family of the Higgs's got on amazingly well in the world: the sons, as their mother was wont exultingly to state, were quite gentlemen, and spent a power of money on their clothes. The Countess, as in their own circle she was invariably called, used always to choose for her favourite topics the uncertainty of worldly distinctions - the horrors of a revolution—and the melancholy situation of a nobleman in a foreign land, where he was forced

to abandon his natural sphere, and had only his own consciousness of high birth to sustain him. Signor Giulio rose marvellously in Mr. Higgs's esteem; for, to his wife's dismay and his fatherin-law's delight, he set up a manufactory of macaroni, which answered so well, that Mr. Higgs used to rub his hands with great glee, and be very grateful to Providence, who had made even a foreigner turn out so well; taking, however, to himself a due share of credit for the benefit his advice had been, as well as for the credit obtained by an alliance with such a 'sponsible family as that of the Higgs's. "I never gave him no credit for nothing because of his mustachers - but, Lord! he knows a good ha'penny from a bad 'un as well as me."

We regret to state that Miss Carry went on to forty-five, falling, and being crossed in love. By the by, as she never got married, a fine moral lesson might be drawn from her fate, touching the inexpediency of too many attachments. At last she took to a blonde cap with roses, and a flaxen wig; became suddenly faithful to her first love, or rather to his memory; and retired with her blighted affections into the country that is to say, she took a small

cottage at Islington; a sickly-looking passion