pure flesh and blood, and whatsoever survives fashion and conventionalism, who can jest so heartily as he? who so make you take "your ease at your inn?" who talk and walk with you, feel, fancy, imagine; be in the woods, the clouds, fairy-land, among friends (there is no man so fond of drawing friends as he is), or if you want a charming woman to be in love with and live with for ever, who can so paint her in a line?

"Pretty, and witty; wild, and yet too, gentle."

All that the Popes and Priors could have conspired with all the Suffolks and Montagues to say of delightful womanhood, could not have out-valued the comprehensiveness of that line. Still, as one is accustomed to think even of the most exquisite women in connexion with some costume or other, be it no more than a slipper to her foot, modern dress insists upon clothing them to one's imagination, in preference to dress ancient. We cannot love them so entirely in the dresses of Arcadia, or in the ruffs and top-knots of the time of Elizabeth, as in the tuckers and tresses to which we have been accustomed. As they approach our own times, they partake of the warmness of our homes. "Anne Page" might have been handsomer, but we cannot take to her so heartily as to "Nancy Dawson," or to" Mary Lepell." Imogen there seems no matching or dispensing with; and yet Lady Winchelsea

when Miss Kingsmill, or Mrs. Brooke when she was Fanny Moore the clergyman's daughter, dancing under the cherry-trees of the parsonage-garden, and

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as remarkable for her gentleness and suavity of manners as for her literary talents,"-we cannot but feel that the "Miss" and the "Fanny" carries us away with it, in spite of all the realities mixed up with those desuetudes of older times.

We have been led into these reflections by a volume of Pope's Letters, which we read over again the other day, and which found our regard for him as fresh as ever, notwithstanding all that we have learnt to love and admire more. We cannot live with Pope and the wits as entirely as we used to do at one period. Circumstances have re-opened new worlds to us, both real and ideal, which have as much enlarged (thank Heaven!) our possessions, as though to a house of the sort above mentioned had been added the gardens of all the east, and the forests (with all their visions) of Greece and the feudal times. Still the house is there, furnished as aforesaid, and never to be given up. And as men after all their day-dreams, whether of poetry or of business (for it is little suspected how much fancy mingles even with that), are glad to be called to dinner or tea, and see the dear familiar faces about them, so, though the author we admire most be Shakspeare, and the two books we can least dispense with on our shelves are Spenser and the "Arabian

Nights," we never quit these to look at our Pope, and our Parnell and Thomson, without a sort of household pleasure in our eyes, and a grasp of the volume as though some Mary Lepell, or Margaret Bellenden, or some Mary or Marianne of our own, had come into the room herself, and held out to us her cordial hand.

Here, then, is a volume of "Pope's Letters," complete in itself (not one of the voluminous edition), a duodecimo, lettered as just mentioned, bound in calf (plain at the sides, but gilt and flowered at the back), and possessing a portrait with cap, open shirt-collar, and great black eyes. We are bibliomaniacs enough to like to give these details, and hope that the reader does not despise them. At the top of the first letter, there is one of those engraved head-pieces, of ludicrously ill-design and execution, which used to "adorn" books a century ago;-things like uncouth dreams, magnified out of all proportion, and innocent of possibility. The subject of the present is Hero and Leander. Hero, with four dots for eyes, nose, and mouth, is as tall as the tower itself out of which she is leaning; and Leander has had a sort of platform made for him at the side of the tower, flat on the water, and obviously on purpose to accommodate his dead body; just as though a coroner's inquest had foreseen the necessity there would be for it. But we must not be tempted at present into dwelling upon illustrations of this kind. We design some day, if a wood en

graver will stand by us, to give something of an historical sketch of their progress through old romances, classics, and spelling-books, with commentaries as we proceed, and a "fetching out" of their beauties; not without an eye to those initial letters and tail-pieces, in which As and Bs, nymphs, satyrs, and dragons, &c. flourish into every species of monstrous, grotesque, and half-human exube

rance.

What we would more particularly take occasion to say from the volume before us, agreeably to our design of noticing whatever has been least or not at all noticed by the biographers, is, that notwithstanding our long intimacy with the writings of Pope, we found in it some things which we do not remember to have observed before,-little points of personal interest, which become great enough in connection with such a man to be of consequence to those who would fain know him as if they had lived with him, and which the biographers (who, in fact, seldom do more than repeat one another) have not thought it worth their while to attend to.

The first is, that whereas the personal idea of Pope, which we generally present to our minds in consequence of the best-known prints of him is that of an elderly man, we here chiefly see him as a young one, from the age of sixteen to thirty, and mostly while he lived at Binfield in Windsor Forest, when his principal fame arose from his happiest production, "The Rape of the Lock." We see him also

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caressed, as he deserved to be, by the ladies; and intimating with a becoming ostentation (considering the consciousness of his personal defects which he so touchingly avows at other times), what a very lively young fellow" he was (to speak in the language of the day), and how pleased they were to pay him attention. The late republication of the writings of Lady Mary Wortley Montague has revived the discussion respecting her supposed, and but too probable brusquerie towards him (for no man deserved greater delicacy in repulse from a woman, than one so sensitive and so unhappily formed as he). We shall here give, as a counter lump of sugar to those old bitters, a passage from a letter written when he was twenty-one, in which he describes the effect which the gaiety of his conversation had on a young lady whom he met in a stagecoach. What he about says 66 a sick woman" being the "worst of evils," is not quite so well. It is not in the taste of Spenser and the other great poets his superiors; yet we must not take it in its worst sense either, but only as one of those "airs" which it was thought becoming in such "young fellows" to give themselves in those days, when people had not properly recovered from the unsentimentalizing effects of the gallantry of the court of Charles II. For the better exhibitions of these our passages of interest, rescued from the comparative obscurity occasioned by the neglect of biographers, we shall give them heads.