n petticoats.'"

"Let us now," says I, "enter upon the second stanza; I find the first
line is still a continuation of the metaphor.

"'I fancy when your song you sing.'"

"It is very right," says he; "but pray observe the turn of words in
those two lines. I was a whole hour in adjusting of them, and have still
a doubt upon me whether in the second line it should be, 'Your song you
sing; or, You sing your song?' You shall hear them both:

"'I fancy, when your song you sing,
Your song you sing with so much art,'

or,

"'I fancy, when your song you sing,
You sing your song with so much art.'"

"Truly," said I, "the turn is so natural either way, that you have made
me almost giddy with it." "Dear sir," said he, grasping me by the hand,
"you have a great deal of patience; but pray what do you think of the
next verse?

"'Your pen was plucked from Cupid's wing.'"

"Think!" says I; "I think you have made Cupid look like a little goose."
"That was my meaning," says he: "I think the ridicule is well enough hit
off. But we come now to the last, which sums up the whole matter.

"'For, ah! it wounds me like his dart.'

"Pray how do you like that Ah! doth it not make a pretty figure in
that place? Ah!--it looks as if I felt the dart, and cried out at being
pricked with it.

"'For, ah! it wounds me like his dart.'

"My friend Dick Easy," continued he, "assured me, he would rather have
written that Ah! than to have been the author of the AEneid. He indeed
objected, that I made Mira's pen like a quill in one of the lines, and
like a dart in the other. But as to that--" "Oh! as to that," says I,
"it is but supposing Cupid to be like a porcupine, and his quills and
darts will be the same thing." He was going to embrace me for the hint;
but half a dozen critics coming into the room, whose faces he did not
like, he conveyed the sonnet into his pocket, and whispered me in the
ear, "he would show it me again as soon as his man had written it over
fair."

XVII.--FATHERLY CARE.

From my own Apartment, June 23.

Having lately turned my thoughts upon the consideration of the behaviour
of parents to children in the great affair of marriage, I took much
delight in turning over a bundle of letters which a gentleman's steward
in the country had sent me some time ago. This parcel is a collection
of letters written by the children of the family to which he belongs to
their f