go or when they return. Isabel's mind and its peculiar genius were quite overlooked by the people who, with the best intentions in the world, were in the habit of computing human beings in the lump, and classing all alike with natures with which they have neither kindred nor analogy.

What unhappy mistakes are constantly occurring in this world of ours, for want of a distinctive classification of the minds and temperaments, over whose destinies we usurp an authority which nature refuses to sanction; and this, because we still persist, right or wrong, in classing individuals by wholesale catalogues! Never was the mistake more woefully illustrated than in the case of Isabel. Here, was a soul of etherial temper, "finely touched and to fine issues." Yet from the gross misdirection of those who should have watched its wanderings, or rather have studied its aspirations, it was rudely transplanted from the quiet spot in which it was embedded,-the home of its purest joys, its unpolluted affections,-from the dear familiar scenes of youth,-from the stream or grove or valley, among which it delighted to wander ;- from rich landscapes fresh with verdure, and rejoicing with nature in their richest attire, where her eye never failed to trace or create new beauty, as it paused to meditate or admire,-transplanted, I say,

to the cheerless, and sterile, and parched soil of a burning clime, where nature rather languishes than reposes; where her beloved melodies of birds, and of cool refreshing breezes, and of gushing brooks, are heard no more; and there is no walking by the side of fragrant hedgerows, or under the shade of embowering elms. Such a being, endued with sensibilities attuned to every noble emotion, ever in extremes, and vibrating with ecstasy, whether of gladness or sorrow, was unfitted for Anglo-Indian society, where no feeling is allowed to exceed its statutable limits, no sympathy to burst the bounds of that conventional complacency of look, thought, manner, and that subdued, disciplined state of feeling, which receives with unfluttered pulse alike the imparted joy or the revealed sorrow.

In such a society, by such a mind, how much was to be endured, to which, unfortunately, it had been never trained! But Isabel, chained in that insipid converse from which there is no flight-and especially during that part of an Indian soirée when the ladies leave the table, and indulge themselves in the habitual topics furnished by the domestic events of the settlement, the suspected flirtation, the reprehended coquetry, and others equally interesting and equally stale from daily recurrence and endless repetition-and her fear of

imputed pedantry, should she attempt the introduction of subjects more familiar to her by thought or reading,-felt unutterable torture, and the more acutely as she was constrained to dissemble it. Now and then, indeed, a rebuke of female inanity did escape her; and it was felt the more acutely because it was expressed, not with bitterness or a contemptuous sense of superiority, but pointedly and eloquently. The women leagued in a society of sneer and sarcasm against her; and, without suspecting it, she found herself engaged in that warfare, ἡ μάχη τῶν γλῶσσων, that war of tongues, in which no one is invincible.

Isabel W. was the most beautiful and sylphlike female of the lesser order of figure my eyes ever beheld. Her step was graceful beyond any thing I had heretofore witnessed; it was winged rather than pedestrian; she seemed to hover about you rather than to stand near you; and, after half-an-hour's converse with her, such was the celestial airiness of her form, and such the silver sound of her voice, which seemed like notes struck from an angel's lyre, and such (probably her personal fascinations should incline me to mistrust my own estimate)-such the wisdom that welled forth, pure, bright, and unaffected, from her lips, I always felt as if I had been conversing for that short pe

riod with some vision indulged to us as a specimen from the world of better and happier spirits. Yet all her feelings were feminine; her perceptions of feminine propriety instinctively keen; and, in one word, it would have been almost a pardonable idolatry to have fallen down and worshipped her, as the living image of virtue.

What did this avail in the society of Madras? It is certainly true that she created a considerable sensation (to use an unmeaning, but common phrase) upon her first arrival; and many of the eligibles flocked around her. The kind friends, with whom she was domiciled, gave her the usual catalogue raisonné of the unmarried members of the civil and military services. As to the latter, except in the case of a few lucrative staff situations, they are universally sneered at. Majors, captains, and lieutenant-colonels, are only the sad refuge of desponding virgins-the straws caught hold of in the last paroxysms of despair. Moreover, the same friendly monitors could enumerate within a few fanams the amount of their respective salaries, and all their brilliant expectancies in the background ;-to what Mr. B***, the collector of Tanjore, would probably be appointed, as soon as Mr. W**** of the Revenue Board, who was happily in the last stage of a liver complaint, should make room for him; or

the cholera morbus make a few fortunate inroads upon the Sudder-ul-Dawlet, or Mr. C***, the resident at Hyderabad, fall by the tusks of a wild boar, the only event that could possibly wean him from the dangerous amusement of the boar-hunt—either of which auspicious incidents would double or treble Mr. B***'s salary :-besides this, the good friend, who was thus pulling up the curtain of futurity to her young charge, pointed out to her, and in no very distant perspective, a seat in council for Mr. B***, that ultima Thule of a civilian's ambition. Never did the chapter of human accidents unfold so many delightful promises. To be sure, there was a per-contra creditor to all this; for Mr. B*** was a very dull and a very cross man, and exceedingly penurious withal, and his servants, in their English jargon, used to call him "a makeafraid man,” because he was in the habit of beating them, or pulling off their turbans, when they could not understand his bad Hindostannee. A gentleman, so peevish and tyrannical, was not indeed exactly cut out for the fairest, the gentlest, the kind-est of created beings. Added to this, Mr. B*** was very middling in point either of intellect or acquisitions; but, instead of being humbled by the consciousness of his inferiority, he was weak enough to think that it would not be discerned by others,