heatsheaf-ears of the golden-visaged
Amabel Fryar-Gunnett, daughter of Demeter in the field to behold, of
Aphrodite in her rosy incendiarism for the many of men; filling that
pearly concave with a perversion of the uttered speech, such as never
lady could have repeated, nor man, if less than a reaping harvester:
which verily for women to hear, is to stamp a substantial damnatory
verification upon the delivery of the saying:--

'Mrs. Warwick says of you, that you're a bundle of straws for everybody
and bread for nobody.'

Or, stranger speculation, through what, and what number of conduits,
curious, and variously colouring, did it reach the fair Amabel of the
infant-in-cradle smile, in that deformation of the original utterance! To
pursue the thing, would be to enter the subter-sensual perfumed caverns
of a Romance of Fashionable Life, with no hope of coming back to light,
other than by tail of lynx, like the great Arabian seaman, at the last
page of the final chapter. A prospectively popular narrative indeed! and
coin to reward it, and applause. But I am reminded that a story properly
closed on the marriage of the heroine Constance and her young Minister of
State, has no time for conjuring chemists' bouquet of aristocracy to lure
the native taste. When we have satisfied English sentiment, our task is
done, in every branch of art, I hear: and it will account to posterity
for the condition of the branches. Those yet wakeful eccentrics
interested in such a person as Diana, to the extent of remaining
attentive till the curtain falls, demand of me to gather-up the threads
concerning her: which my gardener sweeping his pile of dead leaves before
the storm and night, advises me to do speedily. But it happens that her
resemblance to her sex and species of a civilized period plants the main
threads in her bosom. Rogues and a policeman, or a hurried change of
front of all the actors, are not a part of our slow machinery.

Nor is she to show herself to advantage. Only those who read her woman's
blood and character with the head, will care for Diana of the Crossways
now that the knot of her history has been unravelled. Some little love
they must have for her likewise: and how it can be quickened on behalf of
a woman who never sentimentalizes publicly, and has no dolly-dolly
compliance, and muses on actual life, and fatigues with the exercise of
brains, and is in sooth an alien: a princess of her kind and time, but a
foreign one, s