ould have shot a lighter dart, had she meant it to fly and fix.

Proclaim, ye classics, what minor Goddess, or primal, Iris or Ate, sped
straight away on wing to the empty wheatsheaf-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