irlpool of dissipation, and tasted the
rank poisons which are so often sought as the remedies for a sad heart.
From folly she ran to imprudence; from imprudence to guilt;--and was
the runaway wife happier than she who once suffered unmerited ill-usage
at home? Time will show.

"At Brighton, my wheels rattled along the cliffs as briskly and as
loudly as the noblest equipage there; but no female turned a glance of
recognition towards my windows, and the eyes of former friends were
studiously averted. I bore my lady through the streets, and I waited for
her now and then at the door of the theatre; but at gates of
respectability, at balls, and at assemblies, I, alas! was never
'called,' and never 'stopped the way.' Like a disabled soldier, I ceased
to bear _arms_, and I was _crest_-fallen!

"This could not last: my mistress could little brook contempt,
especially when she felt it to be deserved; her cheek lost its bloom,
her eye its lustre; and when her beauty became less brilliant, she no
longer possessed the only attraction which had made the captain her
lover. He grew weary of her, soon took occasion to quarrel with her, and
she was left without friends, without income, and without character.
I was at length torn from her: it nearly broke my springs to part with
her; but I was despatched to the bazaar in London, and saw no more of
my lady.

(_To be continued_.)

* * * * *

FASHIONABLE NOVELS.

It is well that hard words break no bones, else two or three gentlemen
of literary notoriety would be in a sorry plight after reading the
following passage in a recent _Magazine_. We stand by, and like
the fellow in the play, bite our thumb:--

"Surely, surely, all men, women, and children, not cursed with the
fatuity that would become a vice-president of the Phrenological Society,
must by this time be about heartsick of what are called Novels of
Fashionable Life. Only two men of any pretensions to superiority of
talent have had part in the uproarious manufacture of this ware, that
has been dinned in our ears by trumpet after trumpet, during the last
six or seven years. Mr. Theodore Hook began the business--a man of such
strong native sense and thorough knowledge of the world as it is, that
we cannot doubt the _coxcombry_ which has drawn so much derision on his
_sayings_ and _doings_ was all, to use a phrase which he himself has
brought into fashion, _humbug_. He could not cast his keen e