"Quelques feintes caresses,

Quelques propos sur le jeu, sur le tems,
Sur un sermon, sur le prix des rubans,
Ont épuisé leurs ames excédées;

Elles chantaient déjà faute d'idées."

Much may be forgiven a man whom we know to be capable of better things, who perhaps despises the vulgar taste to which he is thus pandering; but who shall absolve the pert brainless smatterers, "who have but one idea, and that a wrong one;" who have but one little stock of cut and dried jokes of the same antifeminine tendency, which they vent, usque ad nauseam, in the form of rebus, charade, epigram, and epitaph? A shallow coxcomb of this sort will complacently ask you, "What is the difference between a woman and her glass?" in order that he may anticipate you by exclaiming with an assinine grin-" Because one speaks without reflecting, and the other reflects without speaking." Following up the same idea, he will inquire whether you know how to make the women run after you, and will eagerly reply-"By running away with their looking-glasses." He will tell you that Voltaire says "ideas are like beards-men only get them as they grow up, and women never have any," of which only the former clause of the sentence is Voltaire's, that which has reference to women being the addition of some subsequent zany. At the bare mention of the sign of the Good Woman in Norton Falgate he will chuckle with delight; Chaucer's and Prior's objectionable tales he will quote with egregious glee; upon the subject of marriage he is ready with some half dozen of the established bons-mots,

and he is provided with about the same quantity of epitaphs upon wives-from

"Cy gist ma femme; ah! qu'elle est bien

Pour son répos, et pour le mien,"

which Boileau stupidly pronounced to be the best epigrammatic epitaph upon record, to the more recent

"Here lies my dear wife, a sad vixen and shrew;
If I said I regretted her, I should lie too."

And his facetious dullness will be wound up with a few hard hits at widows, from the dame of Ephesus to the last new subject of scandal; though he will prudently say nothing of those upon the coast of Malabar, who for many ages have continued to afford instances of conjugal devotion, to which no solitary parallel can be produced upon the part of a husband, throughout the whole wide extent of time and space.

His babble, in short, will be a faithful echo of the old jest-books, none of which can be opened without our stumbling upon a hundred of such stale flippancies. Let us consult the Virgilian lots, for instance, of the "Musarum Delicia," by opening it hap-hazard, and we encounter the following venerable joke:

"Women are books, and men the readers be,
In whom ofttimes they great errata see;
Here sometimes we've a blot, there we espy
A leaf misplaced, at least a line awry:
If they are books, I wish that my wife were
An Almanack, to change her every year."

Another dip, and we turn up the following dull invec

tive:

"Commit the ship unto the wind,
But not thy faith to woman-kind;
There is more safety in a wave,
Than in the faith that women have;
No woman's good;-if chance it fall
Some one be good amongst them all,
Some strange intent the Destinies had,
To make a good thing of a bad."

The next venture exhibits some quibbling, too stupid to transcribe, upon the etymology of the word woman, which is made synonymous with woe-to-man; while we are sapiently informed that a very little alteration would convert Eve into evil and devil. Once more we open upon the old falsehood of female inconstancy:

"A woman's love is like a Syrian flower,

That buds, and spreads, and withers in an hour."

And shortly after we begin with the fertile subject of marriage :

"Marriage, as old men note, hath liken'd been

Unto a public fast, or common rout,

Where those that are without would fain get in,

And those that are within would fain get out."

Even in an epitaph upon a young woman, which was meant to be encomiastic, the writer cannot forbear a misplaced taunt upon the sex:

"The body which within this earth is laid,

Twice six weeks knew a wife, a saint, a maid;

Fair maid, chaste wife, pure saint,-yet 'tis not strange-
She was a woman, therefore pleased to change :
And now she's dead, some woman doth remain,
For still she hopes once to be changed again.”

In justice to the author we shall conclude with the following, both because it is in a better style as well as taste:

ON HUSBAND AND WIFE

"To these, whom Death again did wed,
The grave's the second marriage-bed;
For though the hand of Fate could force
"Twixt soul and body a divorce,

It could not sever man and wife,
Because they both lived but one life
Peace, good reader! do not weep;
Peace, the lovers are asleep:
They, sweet turtles, folded lie

In the last knot that love could tie:
Let them sleep, let them sleep on,
Till this stormy night be gone,
And the eternal morrow dawn:
Then the curtain will be drawn,

And they waken with that light

Whose day shall never sleep in night."

And now, before dismissing the gentle reader, we not only caution him against the sorry and stale impertinences levelled at a sex, which, in these days of sordid or ambitious scrambling among men, remains the redeeming bright spot of humanity, and almost the exclusive depository of the virtues; but we do in all sincerity of friendly purpose admonish him to perpend our motto from Middleton; and if he be a bachelor, to lose no

time in becoming a candidate for those ineffable comforts "locked up in woman's love." To guide him in this pious undertaking, we will transcribe for him Sir John Mennis's instructions

HOW TO CHOOSE A WIFE,

"Good Sir, if you'll show the best of your skill
To pick a virtuous creature,

Then pick such a wife, as you love a life,
Of a comely grace and feature.
The noblest part let it be her heart,
Without deceit or cunning;

With a nimble wit, and all things fit,

With a tongue that's never running:
The hair of her head it must not be red,
But fair and brown as a berry;
Her forehead high, with a crystal eye,
Her lips as red as a cherry."

PORTRAIT OF A SEPTUAGENARY;

BY HIMSELF. *

"I will conduct you to a hill-side, laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospects and melodious sounds, that the harp of Orpheus was not half so charming.

AFTER all the critical denunciations against the unfortunate wight, who suffered the smallest inkling of himself or his affairs to transpire in his writings;-after the

* Now no longer in existence.