can she lay her glasses down,
And say she reads as well,
When, through a double convex lens,
She just makes out to spell?

Her father--grandpa! Forgive
This erring lip its smiles--
Vowed she would make the finest girl
Within a hundred miles.
He sent her to a stylish school;
'Twas in her thirteenth June;
And with her, as the rules required,
"Two towels and a spoon."

They braced my aunt against a board
To make her straight and tall;
They laced her up, they starved her down,
To make her light and small;
They pinched her feet, they singed her hair,
They screw it up with pins--
Oh, never mortal suffered more
In penance for her sins!

So when my precious aunt was done,
My grandsire brought her back
(By daylight, lest some rabid youth
Might follow on the track);
"Ah!" said my grandsire, as he shook
Some powder in his pan,
"What could this lovely creature do
Against a desperate man?"

Alas, nor chariot nor barouche
Nor bandit cavalcade
Tore from the trembling father's arms
His all-accomplished maid.
For her how happy had it been!
And heaven had spared to me
To see one sad, ungathered rose
On my ancestral tree.

MISMATED MEN OF GENIUS.

Some Distinguished Writers, Artists, and Composers Who Were Rather Less
Fortunate in Choosing Wives With Congenial Temperaments Than in Following
the Paths That Led Them On to Fame.

In writing on the subject of the influence of matrimony on men of genius,
E.P. Whipple, the Boston essayist and lecturer, mentioned the cases of
several who, like Moliere and Rousseau, have had unsympathetic wives.
Among these was Sir Walter Scott, who while walking with his wife in the
fields called her attention to some lambs, remarking that they were
beautiful.

"Yes," echoed she, "lambs are beautiful--boiled!"

That incomparable essayist and chirping philosopher, Montaigne, married
but once. When his good wife left him, he shed the tears usual on such
occasions, and said he would not marry again, though it were to Wisdom
herself.

A young painter of great promise once told Sir Joshua Reynolds that he had
taken a wife. "Married!" ejaculated the horrified Sir Joshua; "then you
are ruined as an artist."

Michelangelo, when asked why he never married, replied:

"I have espoused my art, and that occasio