in Clout" that her ambition is

"So high in thought as she herself in place."

And that she

"Loatheth each lowly thing with lofty eye."

Her beauty, too, is dwelt upon as a "thing celestial,"--her humble
family alluded to,--the boasted freedom of her heart; and upon
Rosalinde and Mirabella an affectation of the demigoddessship, which
turned their heads, is equally charged. In all essential
characteristics they are "twin cherries growing on one stalk."

Of Rose Daniel's life so little is known, particularly during her
unmarried years, that we are unable to fasten upon her the unamiable
qualities of the allegorical beauties we assume to be her
representatives; but if we can identify her married fortune with
theirs,--then, in addition to the congruities already mentioned, we
can have no hesitation in imputing to _her_ the disposition which
brought down upon _them_, so bitterly and relentlessly, the poetic
justice of the disappointed shepherd. We may thus dispose of them in
brief.

Mirabella's lot was severe. She was married (if we rightly interpret
the language of the allegory) to a "_fool_,"--that is to say, to a
very absurd and ridiculous person, under whose conduct she was
exposed to the "whips and scorns," the disdain and bitter retaliation,
natural to the union of a beautiful and accomplished, though vain
and haughty woman, with a very eccentric, irritable, and bombastic
humorist.

Rosalinde was married--with no better fate, we fear--to the vain and
treacherous Menalcas.

And Rose Daniel became the wife of the "Resolute John Florio."

We shall commence with the substantial characters, and see how their
histories fall in with the fortunes attributed to the allegorical.
Rose Daniel's husband, maugre his celebrity and places of dignity
and profit, was beset with tempers and oddities which exposed him,
more perhaps than any man of his time, to the ridicule of
contemporary wits and poets. He was, at least in his literary career,
jealous, envious, irritable, vain, pedantic and bombastical,
petulant and quarrelsome,--ever on the watch for an affront, and
always in the attitude of a fretful porcupine with a quill pointed in
every direction against real or supposititious enemies. In such a
state of mental alarm and physical vaporing did he live, that he
seems to have proclaimed a promiscuous war against all gainsayers,--
that is, the literary world; and for the better assurance to them of
his indomitable valo