THE BOROUGH.

LETTER XX.

THE POOR OF THE BOROUGH.

ELLEN ORFORD.

Patience and sorrow strove

Who should express her goodliest.—SHAKSPEARE.

the fact I know,

And old will other heroines grow;
But not like them has she been laid,
In ruin'd castle, sore dismay'd;
Where naughty man and ghostly spright

Fill'd her pure mind with awe and dread,
Stalk'd round the room, put out the light,
And shook the curtains round her bed.
No cruel uncle kept her land,
No tyrant father forced her hand;
She had no vixen virgin-aunt,
Without whose aid she could not eat,
And yet who poison'd all her meat,
With gibe and sneer and taunt.
Yet of the heroine she'd a share,-
She saved a lover from despair,
And granted all his wish, in spite
Of what she knew and felt was right:

But, heroine then no more,

She own'd the fault, and wept and pray'd,

And humbly took the parish aid,

And dwelt among the poor.

The Widow's Cottage Blind Ellen one Hers not the

Sorrows or Adventures of Heroines - What these are, first described Deserted Wives; rash Lovers; courageous Damsels in desolated Mansions; in grievous PerplexityThese Evils, however severe, of short Duration - Ellen's Story - Her Employment in Childhood - First Love; first Adventure; its miserable Termination An Idiot Daughter A Husband-Care in Business without Success- The Men's Despondency and its Effect Their Children: how disposed of — One particularly unfortunate - Fate of the Daughter - Ellen keeps a School and is becomes blind: loses her School Her Consola

happy

tions.

THE BOROUGH.

LETTER XX.

ELLEN ORFORD. (')

;

OBSERVE yon tenement, apart and small,
Where the wet pebbles shine upon the wall
Where the low benches lean beside the door,
And the red paling bounds the space before;
Where thrift and lavender, and lad's-love (2)
bloom,

That humble dwelling is the widow's home;
There live a pair, for various fortunes known,
But the blind Ellen will relate her own;—

(1) The Life of Ellen Orford, though sufficiently burdened with error and misfortune, has in it little besides, which resembles those of the unhappy men in the preceding Letters, and is still more unlike that of Grimes, in a subsequent one. There is in this character cheerfulness and resignation, a more uniform piety, and an immovable trust in the aid of religion. This, with the light texture of the introductory part, will, I hope, take off from that idea of sameness, which the repetition of crimes and distresses is likely to create.

(2) The lad's or boy's love, of some counties, is the plant southern-wood, the Artemisia Abrotanum of botanists.

Yet ere we hear the story she can tell,

On prouder sorrows let us briefly dwell.

I've often marvel'd, when, by night, by day

I've mark'd the manners moving in my way,
And heard the language and beheld the lives
Of lass and lover, goddesses and wives,
That books, which promise much of life to give,
Should show so little how we truly live. (1)

To me it seems, their females and their men Are but the creatures of the author's pen; Nay, creatures borrow'd and again convey'd From book to book-the shadows of a shade: Life, if they'd search, would show them many a change;

The ruin sudden, and the misery strange!

With more of grievous, base, and dreadful things,
Than novelists relate or poet sings : (2).

But they, who ought to look the world around,
Spy out a single spot in fairy-ground;

Where all, in turn, ideal forms behold,
And plots are laid and histories are told.

(1) ["That 'le vrai n'est pas toujours vraisemblable,' we do not deny ; but we are prepared to insist that, while le vrai' is the highest recommendation of the historian of real life, the 'vraisemblable' is the only legitimate province of the novelist who aims at improving the understanding or touching the heart." GIFFORD.]

(2) [

"Truth is always strange

Stranger than fiction. If it could be told,

How much would Novels gain by the exchange?" &c.—BYRON. See antè, vol. ii. p. 60.]