scenes had left in her mind, that scarcely any reality would have equalled the brilliant phantasies she had so minutely described as realities to her wondering schoolfellows.

The contrast, therefore, between her recollections and her actual revision of those objects was at once ludicrous and painful.

She could scarcely believe that she was positively in Sackville Street, which she had so often boasted, and always believed, was twice as long as Piccadilly; and she actually blushed as she confessed that of the two bridges, Westminster was larger than Carlisle. Whilst on the other hand, Lord Henry's surprise at finding the public buildings better than he expected, was so unguardedly expressed that even his praise was mortifying as it proved, in an inverse ratio, the excess of his previous contempt.

Contrary to the wishes and expectations of both, they did not meet Mr. Hamilton in

Dublin. But they found a letter from him saying, that as soon as he knew what day Lord and Lady Henry had fixed for visiting Mr. O'Dwyer, he would make arrangements for joining the party.

"Poor Walter!" exclaimed Ellen, as she laid down the letter which Lord Henry had given her to read, whilst he perused his more interesting English correspondence. "How happy I shall be to see him again!"

"Who are you so anxious to see now, Ellen?" enquired Lord Henry, with a good-humoured smile, as he took up the last unopened packet.

"Poor, dear, Walter Hamilton," replied she, adding as she looked round the apartment they sat in at the hotel: "it was in this very room he gave me this bunch of seals on the morning we sailed for Holyhead."

As she finished her speech, her dark eyes, in which the glistening of a tear was almost per

ceptible, having completed the circuit of the walls, rested on her husband's countenancewho, in the meantime, had transferred his gaze to hers.

"I thought Mr. Hamilton's initial of W, had stood for the name of William," observed Lord Henry, in a tone of the most perfect indifference.

"Oh! no- you know he was called Walter after my father - his mother was a Miss O'Dwyer-a distant relation of ours, who mar ried against her parents' consent and it was only when my father, after her death, brought young Walter to our house, that the two families were at all reconciled."

"I really never heard before so much of my agent's family history," rejoined Lord Henry, and as he spoke there was a supercilious curl in his upper lip that told volumes. But Ellen did not notice it. She was occupied in thinking of the emphasis his Lordship had laid on the words "my agent," and in wishing that

"poor, dear, cousin Walter was as rich and as happy as he deserved to be."

66

At last the day arrived which was fixed for their departure from Dublin, and from different motives it was hailed with equal pleasure by both. Lord Henry hated what he called sight-seeing," but in compliment to his wife he had dragged his weary length into every shew-place in Dublin, from the College Library down to the charitable repository, above the shoemaker's shop in Grafton-street.

It was one of the periods, say sone forty years ago, in which the Viceroy spent his thirty odd thousand a-year in England, or in domestic bliss, or in El Dorado, for what was known to the contrary by the people who were taxed for the maintenance of Vice-regal splendour, and Dublin was left without a court, without a parliament, and without a trade. It was an anomaly amongst cities; with a palace, unin habited, but not in ruins, for every now and then St. Patrick's Hall had been, in the trades

man's phrase, "done up" and occasionally new furniture placed in rooms that were never intended to be occupied; with a national bank, doing less business in a year than Drummond's would do in a day, and occupying with its mahogany desks and dandy clerks, the site where senates sat and orators declamed; with a Custom-house, that in its elevation would not discredit Palladio but in its degradation seemed but a beautiful cenotaph for expiring commerce. But what avail these retrospections? In short, Dublin, with the capability of being every thing was as nothing-a seaport without bustle-a garrision without fortifications-a capital without a governor. Where could its prototype be seen? Not in the crowded streets and loaded quays of Bristol, for the streets of Dublin were only crowded with beggars and the quays were stands for nothing but Hackneycoaches. Not in the solitary grandeur of Rome, for the only ruins in Dublin were the shops and their bankrupt owners-not in the