onversation, and not by large
folios of quotations from books which every body knows; or if they are
anxious to shew that they can write, we can tell them they are very
wrong in having any such wish. I will put it to any man--are not the
pleasantest women of his acquaintance, those to whose handwriting he is
the greatest stranger? Did they not think their adored enslaver, who at
one time was considered, when they were musing on her charms, beneath
some giant tree, within the forest shade, "too fair to worship, too
divine to love,"--did they not think her a little less divine, without
being a bit more loveable, when they pored over, in her autograph, a
long and foolish extract from some dunderhead's poems, with the points
all wrong placed, and many of the words misspelt?

_Shepherd_. Neither points nor spellin's o' the smallest consequence in
a copy o' verses.

_North_. Think of the famous lovers of antiquity, James. Do you think
Thisbe kept a scrap-book, or that Pyramus slipped "Lines on Thisbe's
Cat" through the celebrated hole-in-the-wall? No such thing. If he had,
there would have been as little poetry in his love as in his verses. No
man could have had the insolence, not even a Cockney poetaster, to kill
himself for love, after having scribbled namby-pambys in a pale-blue,
gilt-edged album.

_Shepherd_. Faith--that's rather a lauchable idea.

_North_. In every point of view, scrap-books are the death of love. Many
a very sensible man can "whisper soft nonsense in a lady's ear," when
all the circumstances of the scene are congenial. We ourselves have
frequently descended to make ourselves merely the most agreeable man in
the world, till we unfortunately discovered that the blockheads who
could not comprehend us when we were serious, were still farther from
understanding the ineffable beauty of our nonsense; so that in both
cases we were the sufferers. They took our elegant badinage for our
sober and settled opinions, and laughed in the most accommodating manner
when we delivered our real and most matured sentiments.

_Blackwood's Magazine_.

* * * * *

Notes of a Reader

LORD BYRON'S FIRST LOVE.--NEWSTEAD.

Sir Richard Phillips who has been for some months on a Tour of Inquiry
and Observation through the United Kingdom, has just published his
_First Part_, containing Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire,
and part of Nottinghamshire. Sir Richard visited _Newste