ot respond to his rapture, but who should
drop an unseasonable intimation of preferring one of his anterior
bargains to the present!--The last is always his best hit--his
"Cynthia of the minute."--Alas! how many a mild Madonna have I
known to _come in_--a Raphael!--keep its ascendancy for a few brief
moons--then, after certain intermedial degradations, from the front
drawing-room to the back gallery, thence to the dark parlour,--adopted
in turn by each of the Carracci, under successive lowering ascriptions
of filiation, mildly breaking its fall--consigned to the oblivious
lumber-room, _go out_ at last a Lucca Giordano, or plain Carlo
Maratti!--which things when I beheld--musing upon the chances and
mutabilities of fate below, hath made me to reflect upon the altered
condition of great personages, or that woful Queen of Richard the
Second--

--set forth in pomp,
She came adorned hither like sweet May.
Sent back like Hollowmass or shortest day.

With great love for _you_, J.E. hath but a limited sympathy with what
you feel or do. He lives in a world of his own, and makes slender
guesses at what passes in your mind. He never pierces the marrow of
your habits. He will tell an old established play-goer, that Mr.
Such-a-one, of So-and-so (naming one of the theatres), is a very
lively comedian--as a piece of news! He advertised me but the other
day of some pleasant green lanes which he had found out for me,
_knowing me to be a great walker_, in my own immediate vicinity--who
have haunted the identical spot any time these twenty years! He has
not much respect for that class of feelings which goes by the name
of sentimental. He applies the definition of real evil to bodily
sufferings exclusively--and rejecteth all others as imaginary. He
is affected by the sight, or the bare supposition, of a creature in
pain, to a degree which I have never witnessed out of womankind. A
constitutional acuteness to this class of sufferings may in part
account for this. The animal tribe in particular he taketh under his
especial protection. A broken-winded or spur-galled horse is sure to
find an advocate in him. An over-loaded ass is his client for ever. He
is the apostle to the brute kind--the never-failing friend of those
who have none to care for them. The contemplation of a lobster boiled,
or eels skinned _alive_, will wring him so, that "all for pity he
could die." It will take the savour from his palate, and the r