THE SORROWS OF WERTER.

BY AN OXONIAN.

THIS world has grown so common-place and prosaic, that life itself is nothing but a continuous sleep; flirtation and courtship are but a morning dream, and debts and marriage a diversified species of nightmare. One universal snore echoes from pole to pole. The sun is but our rushlight to scare away housebreakers and ghosts; heaven's skies are but the drapery round our repose; and the earth, swinging so gently upon its axis, is but the suspended cradle in which are rocked the myriads of mankind. The Alexanders, the Cæsars, and the Napoleons have passed away for ever. The world, after being kept awake by its fears, and listening in trembling anticipation to the tramp of destroying millions, has now, like some huge alderman disturbed by a frightful dream, yawned horrible a ghastly yawn, pulled the nightcap farther over its brows, and buried itself in a complete and comfortable oblivion.

Yet, in spite of this decay of interesting occurrences there are still left many who eke out an unromantic tale from the stores of their imagination. Many, especially of the softer sex, in whom the fire

of romance blazes fiercely as in any bosom of the period of the crusades. Many are the ladies who deserve a happier fate than to be born in our degenerate days; worthy to have refused their smiles even to their favoured knight, till their smiles were no longer worth contending for; and, at last, to have made their champion the happiest of men by bestowing upon him all their hoarded charms, when spears and bludgeons had knocked out the eyes of the one, and years and sorrows had dimmed the glances of the other. It is surely a pleasant thing when the imagination can thus invest even the details of ordinary life with an interest derived from the times of chivalry; when, by a wave of its wand, it can transform a cornet of dragoons into Amadis de Gaul, and raise distressed damsels and dark enchanters out of a ladies' preparatory school and a visitation dinner of the clergy. In country towns, where society is undiversified, and actual life presents no prominent object to relieve the Dutch-like flatness of its surface, who does not recollect instances of romantic spinsters nourishing high fancies, even in so dull a retirement, and expecting, in the dearth even of ordinary events, the daily occurrence of miraculous adventures? And why should we grudge them the indulgence of their imaginations? Expectation of something strange on the morrow keeps them from lamenting the disappointment of to-day; and years fly over them lightly when every hour may be loaded with wonders; when

the shoemaker may turn out the injured elder brother of the squire, or the grocer be discovered to have been changed with a marquis while at nurse.

Miss Alice, or, as she called herself, Miss Alicia, Gaperling, was a small featured, affected little woman, about the age of seven or eight and thirty; she lived in the village of Horsingdean, and gradually, from being the youngest at tea parties, after eating at side tables through her teens, and flirting through five or six generations of curates and attorneys, she found herself still with her maiden name, but rather looked up to as a senior in the society.

It was easy, from the style of her conversation, to discover what novel she had been last studying; as she uniformly made the heroine of it her model, and was gay or melancholy, dashing or sentimental, just as the author had described. I was assured that, after studying Rob Roy, she covered her locks with a man's hat and was thrown by her donkey, generally the most patient and pacific of quadrupeds, into a ditch half filled with water, in trying to gallop over a hedge in imitation of the hunting exploits of Diana Vernon.

One evening a party of the village fashionables were assembled at her house at tea. Among the guests was Mr. Mordent, an eccentric old gentleman, who, in spite of the most benignant look and the kindest manners in the world, was an object of general dislike to the neighbourhood, and of particular aver