perfections to be known; she shuns the converse of men as the plague; she only lives in the enjoyment of herself, and has not the humanity to communicate that happiness to any of our sex.' 'Well,' said Mr. Hutchinson, but I will be acquainted with her.'

It is difficult, as we read this, to realise that we are reading Puritan memoirs, with such admirable skill is the lover's idyll recounted. So dramatic, too, is the situation that it seems that the whole story must be the creation of Fletcher's muse. However, the course of true love was not altogether to run smooth. Soon after the episode of the song, as the company were at dinner in the musician's house, 'a footboy of my lady her mother came to young Mrs. Apsley' [Mrs. and Miss were then interchangeable] 'saying that her mother and sister would soon return.' When they asked the messenger if Mrs. Apsley were married, 'having been instructed to make them believe it, he smiled, and pulled out some bride-laces, and told them Mrs. Apsley bade him tell no news, but give them the tokens, and carried the matter so that all the company believed she had been married.' On hearing this poor Mr. Hutchinson ‘immediately turned pale as ashes, and fell a fainting to seize his spirits.' With difficulty concealing his condition, he left the table. When alone he himself began to remember the story told him, and 'to believe that there was some magic in the place which enchanted men out of their right senses.' Make what effort he would, 'the sick heart could not be chid nor advised into health;' and it was not till he had cross-questioned the foot-boy and discovered the fraud that his spirits revived. While now in better hope and waiting to see

his unknown mistress he was one day invited to 'a noble treatment at Sion Garden.' While there it was announced to young Mrs. Apsley that her mother and sister were really come. The solution of this situation, so admirably worked up by Mrs. Hutchinson, must be told in her own inimitable language,-for it would be a profanation to abridge the charm of her description of the lovers' first interview ::

She (young Mrs. Apsley) would immediately have gone, but Mr. Hutchinson, pretending civility to conduct her home, made her stay till the supper was ended; of which he eat no more, now only longing for that sight which he had with such perplexity expected. This at length he obtained; but his heart being prepossessed with his own fancy, was not free to discern how little there was in her to answer so great an expectation. She was not ugly in a careless riding-habit; she had a melancholy negligence both of herself and others, as if she neither affected to please others nor took notice of anything before her; yet in spite of all her indifferancy, she was surprised with some unusual liking in her soul when she saw this gentleman, who had hair, eyes, shape, and countenance enough to beget love in any one at the first, and these set off with a graceful and generous mien which promised an extraordinary person. He was at that time and, indeed, always—very neatly habited, for he wore good and rich clothes, and had a variety of them, and had them well suited and every way answerable, in that little thing showing both good judgment and great generosity-he equally becoming them and they him, which he wore with an equal unaffectedness and such neatness as do not often meet in one. Although he had but at evening sight of her he had so long desired, and that at disadvantage enough for her, yet the prevailing sympathy of his soul made him think all his pains were paid, and this first did whet his desire to a second sight, which he had by accident the next

day, and to his joy, found that she was wholly disengaged from that treaty which he so much feared had been accomplished. He found withal that, though she was modest, she was accostable and willing to entertain his acquaintance. This soon passed into a mutual friendship between them; and though she innocently thought nothing of love, yet was she glad to have acquired such a friend who had wisdom and virtue enough to be trusted with her councils, for she was then much perplexed in mind.

Mrs. Hutchinson goes on to tell us with loving minuteness the details of her courtship, and of 'the opportunity of conversing with her' that was afforded to Mr. Hutchinson 'in those pleasant walks, which at that sweet season of the spring invited all the neighbouring inhabitants to seek their joys; where, though they were never alone, yet they had every day opportunity for converse with each other, which the rest shared not in, while everyone minded their own delights.' She recounts also the wicked machinations of the other ladies of Richmond to make mischief between the lovers, and whose 'witty spite represented all her faults to him, which chiefly terminated in the negligence of her dress and habit, and all womanish ornaments, giving herself wholly up to study and writing.' So ends the story of Mr. Hutchinson's courtship.

The extraordinary felicity with which it is told does not, however, exhaust Mrs. Hutchinson's literary powers. In political satire, in historical narrative, in fervent disquisition, her style-fine, plastic, and glowing, fits closely round her subject, and expands or contracts, in eloquent rhetoric or in terse narration, just as she requires it. Her sketch of English history has a vigour of expression marvellous when compared with the

ordinary historical writing of her age. What could be better than her description of Edward the Confessor as 'that superstitious prince who, sainted for his ungodly chastity, left an empty throne to him that could seize it; or her proud boast against the wild ambition of princes and their flatterers, which in England 'could never in any age so tread down popular liberty but that it rose again with renewed vigour, till at length it trod on those that trampled it before?'

ABRAHAM LINCOLN THE LAST
OF THE PURITANS

I

THE English-speaking world will never read the story of the Rebellion of the Southern States without a thrill of pride and exultation. The achievement of the Puritans in throwing off the tyranny of the Stuarts, and establishing in its place, not license or anarchy, but a wise and liberal polity, was heroic and inspiring. But the veiling hand of time diminishes for modern men its distinctness and reality. With the defence of the Union it is different. We almost hear the reverberations of the cannon at Vicksburg, and our hands may still clasp the hands of those who overthrew embattled treason at Gettysburg and Chattanooga. The glory won by the English race is so near, that it still stirs the blood like a trumpet to read of the patriotism of the men who fought at the call of Lincoln.

Nothing is more admirable, as nothing is more dramatic in recorded history, than the manner in which the North sprang to arms at the news that the nation's flag had been fired on at Fort Sumter. It is all very

well to hire soldiers at so much a day and send them to the front with salutes and rejoicings, but the action of the Eastern and Western States meant a great deal