buting to the maintenance of schools and universityscholars, and all the while behaving with extrordinary generosity to her kindred, and keeping up a noble establishment. Those whom such a description incites to know more of her, will find a good summary of her way of life in Miss Hays's Female Biography, -a work, by the way, which contrives to be at once conventional and liberal, and ought to be in possession of all her country women.

Miss Hays informs us, that the close of this excellent person's life was as suffering as it was patient. An accidental contusion in her bosom, at an early period of life, had left the seeds of a cancer, which for many years she disregarded. About a year and a half before her death she was obliged to undergo an amputation of the part affected, which she did with a noble and sweet fortitude, described in a very touching manner by another of her biographers. "Her ladyship," he tells us, " underwent this painful operation with surprising patience and resolution; she shewed no reluctancy, no struggle or contention; only, indeed, towards the end of the operation she drew such a sigh as any compassionate reader may when he hears this." This is one of the truest and most pathetic things we remember to have read. Unfortunately, the amputation, though it promised well for a time, did no good at last. The disorder returned with greater malignity, and after submitting to it with her usual patience, and exhorting her household and friends, upon her death-bed, in a high strain of enthusiasm,

she expired on the 22d December 1739, in the fiftyseventh year of her age. "Her character in miniature," says the biographer just quoted, " is this. She was a lady of the exactest breeding, of fine intellectual endowments, filled with divine wisdom, renewed in the spirit of her mind, fired with the love of her Creator, a friend to all the world, mortified in soul and body, and to every thing that is earthly, and a little lower than the angels." He has a mysterious anecdote of her in the course of his account. "The following remarkable circumstance happened to her in her youth. A young lady, of less severity of manners than herself, invited her once to an entertainment over a romance, and very dear did she pay for it; what evil tinctures she took from it I cannot tell, but this I can, that the remembrance of it would now and then annoy her spirit down into declining life." Miss Hays concludes the memoir in the Female Biography, with informing us, that " she was fond of her pen, and frequently employed herself in writing; but, previous to her death, destroyed the greater part of her papers. Her fortune, beauty, and amiable qualities, procured her many solicitations to change her state; but she preferred, in a single and independent life, to be mistress of her actions and the disposition of her income.”

It seems pretty clear from all these accounts, that this noble-hearted woman, notwithstanding her beauty and sweet temper, was as imperfect a specimen of animal humanity as her kinsman was of spiritual.

We are far from meaning to prefer his state of existence. We confess that there are many persons we have read of, whom we would rather have been, than the most saintly of solitary spirits; but the mere reflection of the good which Lady Elizabeth did to others, would not allow us a moment's hesitation, if compelled to chuse between inhabiting her infirm tenement and the jolly vacuity of Honourable William. At the same time it is evident, that the fair saint neglected the earthly part of herself in a way neither as happymaking nor as pious as she took it for. Perhaps the example of her kinsman tended to assist this false idea of what is pleasing to heaven, and made her a little too peremptory against herself; but what had not her lovers a right to say? For our parts, had we lived then, and been at all fitted to aspire to a return of her regard, we should have thought it a very unfair and intolerable thing of her, to go on doing the most exquisite and seducing actions in the world, and tell us that she wished to be mistress of her own time and generosities. So she might, and yet have been generous to us as well as to the charity boys. But setting this aside (and the real secret is to be found, perhaps, in matters into which we cannot inquire), a proper attention to that beauteous form which her spirit inhabited, might have done great good to herself. She not only lived nearly half a century less than her kinsman, and thus shortened a useful life, but the less healthy state of her blood rendered even a soul like her's liable to incursions of melancholy to the last moment of her

existence. If it be said that this stimulated her the more to extract happiness out of the happiness of others, we do not deny that it may have done so; nor do we pretend to say, that this might not have been her best state of existence for herself and all of us, if we could inquire into matters hidden from our sight. But upon that principle, so might her relation's. It is impossible to argue to any purpose upon these assumptions, which are only good for patience, not for action. William Hastings was all bodily comfort; Elizabeth Hastings was all mental grace. How far the liability of the former to gusts of passion, as well as the other conditions of his being, settled the balance with her necessity for being patient, it is impossible to say; but it is easy and right to say, that nobody would like to undergo operations for a cancer, or to die at fifty-seven, when they could live healthily to a hundred.

What, then, is our conclusion? This: that the proper point of humanity lies between the two natures, though not at equal distances; the greatest possible sum of happiness for mankind demanding that great part of our pleasure should be founded in that of others. Those, however, who hold rigid theories of morality and yet practise them not (which is much oftener the case with such theories than the reverse), must take care how they flatter themselves they resemble Lady Elizabeth. Their extreme difference with her kinsman is a mere cant, to which all the privileged selfishness and sensuality in the world give the lie—

all the pomps and vanities, all the hatreds, all the malignities, all the eatings and drinkings, such as William Hastings himself would have been ashamed of. In fact, their real instincts are generally as selfish as his, though in other shapes, and much less agreeable for every body. When cant lives as long and healthy a life as his, or as good a one as her's, it will be worth attending to. Till then, the best thing to advise is, neither to be canting, nor merely animal, nor over spiritual; but to endeavour to enjoy, with the greatest possible distribution of happiness, all the faculties we receive from nature.

LIX.-RETURN OF AUTUMN

THE autumn is now confirmed. The harvest is over; the summer birds are gone or going; heavy rains have swept the air of its warmth, and prepared the earth for the impressions of winter.

And the author's season changes likewise. We can no longer persuade ourselves that it is summer, by dint of resolving to think so. We cannot warm ourselves at the look of the sunshine. Instead of sitting at the window, "hindering" ourselves, as people say, with enjoying the sight of Nature, we find our knees turned round to the fire-place, our face opposite a pictured instead of a real landscape, and our feet toasting upon a fender.