MARIANNE.

and bent, and squalid, like one who comes Hitherto these expectations had been disapfrom a devouring shipwreck or a long cap- pointed. Halls, places, houses, granges, tivity, who but Mary could have recognised lodges, parks, and courts out of number, we Thomas Clere? Her heart knew him on the had visited; but neither in the north nor in instant, and with a piercing cry of joy and the south had I yet been so happy as to be the thankfulness, she rushed into his arms. The inhabitant of a castle. This too was a genuine cry alarmed the whole family. They hasten- Gothic castle, towered and turreted, and bated to share the joy and the surprise, and to tlemented, and frowning, as heart could derelieve poor Thomas of his fainting burden. sire; a real old castle, that had still a moat, Both had sunk together on the snowy ground; and had once exhibited a draw-bridge; a and when loosened from his long embrace, the castle that had certainly existed in the "old happy wife was dead!-the shock of joy had border day," and had in all probability underbeen fatal! gone as many sieges as Branksome itself, inasmuch as it had, during its whole existence, the fortune to belong to one of the noblest and most warlike names of the "Western Wardenry.' Moreover, it was kept up in great style, had spears, bows, and stags' horns in the hall, painted windows in the chapel, a whole suit of armour in the picture gallery, and a purple velvet state-bed, gold-fringed, coroneted, and plumed, covered with a purple quilt to match, looking just like a pall, and made up with bolsters at each end, a symmetry which proved so perplexing to the mayor of the next town, who with his lady happened to sleep there on some electioneering, fairly got in at different ends, and lay the whole night head to foot.* I was not in the coroneted bed, to be sure; I do not think I should much have relished lying under that pall-like counterpane and those waving feathers; but I was in a castle grand and romantic enough even to satisfy the romance of a damsel under seventeen, and I was enchanted; the more especially as the number of the family party promised an union of the modern gaiety, which I was far from disliking, with the ancient splendour for which I sighed. But, before I had been four-and-twenty hours within those massive walls, I began to experience "the vanity of human wishes," to wonder what was become of my raptures, to yawn I did not know why, to repeat to myself over and over again the two lines of Scott that seemed most à-propos to my situation,

I HAVE had a very great pleasure to-day, although to make my readers fully comprehend how great a one, I must go back more years than I care to think of. When a very young girl, I passed an autumn amongst my father's relatives in a northern county. The greater part of the time was spent with his favourite cousin, the lady of a rich baronet, who was on the point of setting out on an annual visiting tour, as the manner is in those hospitable regions where the bad roads, the wide distances, and the large mansions, render an occasional sojourn so much preferable to the brief and formal interchange of mere dinner-parties. Sir Charles and lady C. were highly pleased at the opportunity which this peregrination of friendship and civility afforded, to show me a fine country, and to introduce me to a wide circle of family connections.

Our tour was extensive and various. My cousins were acquainted, as it seemed to me, with every one of consequence in the county, and were themselves two of the most popular persons it contained,-he from character, for never was any man more unaffectedly good and kind,—she from manner, being one of the pleasantest women that ever lived, the most lively and good-humoured, and entertaining, and well-bred. In course, as the young relative and companion of this amiable couple, I saw the country and its inhabitants to great advantage. I was delighted with every thing, and never more enchanted than when, after journeying from house to house for upwards of a month, we arrived at the ancient and splendid baronial castle of the Earl of G.

Now I had caught from Sir Walter Scott's admirable poems, then in their height of fashion, as well as from the older collections of Percy and Ritson, with which I had been familiar almost from the cradle, a perfect enthusiasm for all that savoured of feudal times; and one of the chief pleasures which I had promised myself in my northern excursion was the probability of encountering some relics of those picturesque but unquiet days.

"And all in high baronial pride

A life both dull and dignified;”— in short, to find out that stupid people will be stupid any-where, even in a castle. I will give after my fashion a slight outline, a sort of pen-and-ink drawing of the party round the dining table; and by the time they have scanned it, my readers, if they do not yawn too, will at least cease to wonder at my solecism in good-breeding.

We will begin at the earl, a veteran nearly seventy years of age, a tall lank figure with an erect military carriage, a sharp weatherbeaten face, and a few grey hairs most exactly powdered and bound together in a slender

*This accident actually befell the then mayor of N. at Alnwick castle, some years back.

queue behind. His talk was very like his ed to have the best of the battle. Then folperson, long and thin; prosing most unmerci- lowed her sister, the lady Caroline, an intellifully about the American war, and telling in- gent-looking young woman, and no musician terminable zig-zag stories, which set compre--but alack! the fair damsel was in love, and hension at defiance. For the rest, he was an on the very point of marriage. Her lover excellent person, kind to his family and civil Lord B. (who may as well fall into this divito his guests; he never failed to take wine sion, since he was domesticated in the house with lady C. at dinner, and regularly every and already considered as a son,) was also morning made me in the very same words a pleasant-looking,-but then he was in love too. flourishing compliment on my rosy cheeks.

Of course this couple, although doubtless very good company for each other, went for nothing with the rest of the party, of whose presence indeed they, to do them justice, seemed generally most comfortably unconscious.

Next in order came the countess, tall, and lean like her husband, and (allowing for difference of sex and complexion, his skin resembling brickdust in colour, and hers being of the sort of paleness usually called sallow,) Next came the appendages to a great house, not unlike him in countenance. In their the usual official residents. First appeared minds and manners there was also a similari- Mr. M. the family chaplain, a great mathematy, yet not without some difference. Dulness tician, whose very eyes seemed turned inward in him showed itself in dead speech, in her as if contemplating the figures on his brain. in dead silence. Stiff and cold as a poker Never was man so absent since the one dewas my lady. Her fixed, settled, unsmiling scribed by La Bruyere. He once came down silence hung over the banquet like a cloud, to dinner with the wrong side of his waistcoat chilling and darkening all about her. Yet outward; and, though he complained of the they say she was warm-hearted, and (which difficulty of buttoning it, could not discover would seem extraordinary if we did not fre- the reason; and he has been known more than quently meet with instances of the same ap-once to walk about all the morning, and even parent contradiction) was famous for episto- to mount the pulpit, with one white leg and lary composition, dealt out words in writing with astonishing fluency and liberality, and was celebrated far and near for that most intolerable waste of paper which is commonly known by the name of a sensible letter.

Then came the goodly offspring of this noble couple, that is to say, the three youngest; for the elder branches of this illustrious house were married and settled in distant homes. The honourable Frederic G., the only son who remained in the paternal mansion, was a diplomatist in embryo, a rising young man. His company they were not likely to enjoy long, since he was understood to be in training for the secretaryship to a foreign embassy. He had recently come into parliament for a neighbouring borough, and his maiden speech (I wonder who wrote it!) had created a prodigious sensation in the family circle. On the glory of that oration, the echo of his fame, he lived then, and has lived (as far as I know) ever since. I can only say that I never heard him utter more than a monosyllable at a time during the ten days that we breakfasted, dined, and supped in company-ineffable coxcomb! and I have not heard of his speaking in the house of commons from that time to this. There he sits, single-speech G. Of his elder sister, the lady Matilda, I can say no more than that she was reckoned one of the finest harp-players in England-a musical automaton, who put forth notes instead of words, and passed her days in alternate practisings for the purpose of subsequent exhibition (which fatiguing exercise was of course a continual and provoking struggle with a host of stringed difficulties), and in the exhibitions themselves, in which also to my ears the difficulties seem

one black (like the discrepant eyes of my friend the Talking Gentleman), in consequence of having forgotten to draw a silk stocking over his gauze one. He seldom knew the day of the month, often read a wrong lesson, and was pretty sure to forget his sermon; otherwise a most kind and excellent creature, whom for very pity nobody could think of disturbing when he appeared immersed in calculation, which was always. Secondly came Miss R., some time governess and present companion; what a misnomer! the errantest piece of still life I ever encountered, pale, freckled, redhaired, and all over small. Thirdly entered Dr. S., the family physician, a stern oracular man, with a big wig and a tremendous frown. Two red-faced gentlemen, des vieux militaires, who drank my lord's wine and listened to his stories, completed this amusing assembly.

There was another person who never appeared at the dining-table, but whose presence, during the two or three hours that she spent in the saloon in the morning, and about the same time which she passed in the drawingroom after dinner, distressed and annoyed me more than all the party put together. This was the honourable Mrs. G., the earl's mother, (the title had descended to him from an uncle) a lady in her ninety-second year, and sufficiently vigorous to justify the expectation that she might live to see a hundred. She was a tall, spare, tough-looking woman, with a long bony face, dim staring eyes, and an aspect altogether corpse-like and unearthly. Her dress was invariably of black silk with a very long waist, a point-lace kerchief, or rather tippet, and a very small short rounded apron of the same costly material. On her head she wore

light and bounding as a fawn, with a wild fanciful beauty in her bright black eyes, in the play of her features, and the brilliancy of her dark yet glowing complexion! A charming creature in mind and in person, was Miss Marianne,-for by that name alone she was intro- Now if either of us had possessed the duced to me,-almost equally charming in the slightest knowledge of the world, these cirhigh spirits whose elasticity harmonized with cumstances would hardly have failed to sugher animated beauty, or in the tender and pen-gest Marianne's true origin. We should imsive melancholy which so often checkered her gayer mood.

she turned out to be a foreign princess, in the other the daughter of an English duke.

I remember being a little startled, when after I had given all my faith to the Russian legend (for the emperor Paul was the potentate on whom she had pitched for her papapretty choice!) she began to knock down her own castle in the air, for the sake of rebuilding it on an English foundation. I could readily imagine that she had one father, but could not quite comprehend what she should want with two: besides, having given up my mind to the northern romance, I did not like to be disturbed by a see-saw of conjectures, good for nothing but to put one out. I was of a constant disposition, and stuck to the princess Rusty-Fusty version of the story so pertinaciously, that I do not even know what duke she had adopted for her English father. Any one might have been proud of her; for, with all this nonsense, the offspring of an equivocal situation and a neglected education, she was a sweet and charming creature, kind and generous and grateful, with considerable quickness of talent, and a power of attaching those with whom she conversed, such as I have rarely seen equalled. I loved her dearly, and except the formal meals which we shared with the rest of the family, spent nearly the whole of my visit with her alone, strolling through the park or the castle in the mornings, and in the evenings sitting over the fire deep in girlish talk, or turning over the books in the old library with a less girlish curiosity. Oh how sorry we were to part! I saw nobody in the whole north like Marianne.

racter was dormant, though not extinct. In short, the black-eyed beauty of G. Castle was fairly forgotten, till my good stars led me this morning to B. to witness for the first and last time of my life, the ascent of a balloon.

Is there any one of my readers who has not seen this spectacle? If such there be, it may perhaps be necessary to say how much duller than most sights (and almost all sights unconnected with art are dull) that dangerous toy is; how much the letting off a boy's kite excels it in glee, and vies with it in utility; the science of balloons being, as far as I know, nearly the only discovery of this chemical and mechanical age, (when between steam-engines and diving-bells, man contrives to have pretty much his own way with the elements) which has continued to stand altogether still, as cumbersome, as unmanageable, and almost as ugly as the original machine of Montgolfier. Nevertheless the age is also a staring age, and we poor country people who know no better, are easily taken in, so that the announcement of this aeronautic expedition (for so it was called in the programme) drew at least ten thousand gazers into the good town of B. and amongst the rest my simple self.

The day was showery by fits, and we thought ourselves very fortunate in being able to secure a commodious window in a large room just overlooking the space where the balloon was filling. At first we looked at that flagging flapping bag of tri-coloured silk, made dingy by varnish, and dingier still by the pack-thread net-work which enclosed it, giving it, when nearly filled, something of the In a few months, however, I returned into air of a canteloupe melon. A thousand yards the south, and in a very few more the kind of silk, they said, were wasted in that uncousins, with whom I had visited G. Castle, sightly thing, enough (as a calculating milliwere removed from me by death. My other ner of my acquaintance, indignant at such relatives in that county fell gradually off: misapplication of finery, angrily observed) to some died; some went to reside abroad; and have made a hundred dresses with trimmings some were lost to me by the unintended and tippets. We looked at the slow filling estrangement which grows out of a long sus- ball till in our weariness we thought it bepension of intercourse; so that my pleasant came emptier, and then we looked at a pretnorthern tour, unconnected with any previous tier sight,-the spectators. They consisted or subsequent habits or associations, seemed for the most part of country people, spread all an insulated point in my history, a brilliant dream called up to recollection at pleasure like some vivid poem, or some rare and gorgeous tapestry, rather than a series of real events burnt into the mind and the memory by the strange and intense power of personal feelings. Eighteen years had elapsed since I had seen or heard of Marianne. I knew indeed that the good earl and countess had died shortly after my visit, and that their aged mother must in the course of nature have passed away long ago, But of her own destiny I had heard nothing; and, being absorbed in new occupations and nearer friends, I had, I fear, ceased even to guess. The curiosity and wonder excited by her situation had long ceased (for wonder and curiosity are very young feelings,) and the interest produced by her cha

the way down the large space to the meadows, perched on the church-tower, on the side of the F. hill, on trees, on wagons, on the churchyard wall. Nothing was visible but heads and upturned faces, and here and there a little opening made by habitual deference for horsemen and carriages, in that grand and beautiful living mass, a pleased and quiet crowd. Then we looked at the peaceful landscape beyond, the Thames winding in its green meadows under the fine range of the O**shire hills, shut in on one side by the church with its magnificent Gothic tower, on the other by the before-mentioned eminence crowned with trees as with a plume.

Then a sudden shower put motion in the crowd; flight and scrambling and falling ensued; numerous umbrellas were expanded: and the whole scene resembled