Thus may you and I, dear Louise, often hold intercourse with Him, and through Him with one another; thus may we often see the patriarch's vision, "of angels ascending and descending," busy in the ministries of love to us in this the land of our pilgrimage; and, at last, when we go hence to the world beyond, may we see those "shining ones who have preceded us thither, coming down to the margin of the "dark river" to welcome us with harp and song, as in the immortal allegory of old John Bunyan. And now for a little family gossip before I close.

Your old friend, Matilda M- is about to be married. After living so many years, without doing any execution in the world, it is odd that she should thus transfix a heart at the age of forty-two. Yet I find I have been guilty of two improprieties in a breath; for how do I know but she may have, in her desk, half a dozen tributes from admiring swains twenty years ago; and, in truth, if she attracted none in her bloom, I am sure Cupid must be (as he is represented) blind; for, I fancy, few women could have been more agreeable, and if never handsome, she must have had pleasing features. You will doubtless think it a yet more deadly sin against courtesy, that I should talk thus at random about a lady's age. But, indeed, my dear, I still spoke discreetly; I said forty-two, and I judged so by lady's measure; for, to my certain knowledge, she was forty-five, more than a year ago, according to the reckoning of man's more fleeting years. But ladies' measure of time is by a wand which is truly an enchanter's wand. A year is a variable quantity, and increases as they advance. Up to twenty-five I do not observe any difference between a lady's year and a gentleman's. It is a just annual revolution of the sun from the first point of Aries to the same again, neither more nor less. From twenty-five to thirty, it is, as near as I can guess, about a year and a-half, as we men count years; from thirty to forty the dear creatures seldom advance a year under three of ours; and from forty to five-and-forty, they have a natal day about once in every five years; after that time, each year is an immense lapse of duration, and, in point of fact, I suppose that there are very few ladies that ever do get beyond

fifty. Depend upon it, that Methuselah's wife was but fifty when he was in his nine hundredth year!

Nay, I have known cases, where ladies, like the planets, have not only had their stationary points, but their retrogradations; they have to all appearance travelled back from five-and-thirty to thirty, and then started forward again.

Ask your friend Mrs. Dawson, who went out to New Zealand at nineteen, and who ought now, therefore, to be just thirtyeight. Rely on it, you will find that she is but twenty-nine or thirty at most; and if she appears older, it is all the climate, my dear- that horrid climate

With kindest regards to your husband,
Ever yours affectionately,

LETTER LXIII.

R. E. H. G.

My dear Friend,

To Alfred West, Esq.

I thank you for your note, introducing Mr. L

; for it is always pleasant to hear from you, though in the present case I should have been better pleased had the letter come by her Majesty's servant in the red coat.

I assure you that, for your sake, I did my best to do the civil thing by your friend, and, I hope, not unsuccessfully. But, in short, we did not take; you take me. By the way, there is a double idiom for a despairing foreigner to gape at !

You will say, perhaps, it might be owing to an inopportune hour for his visit, or some other casual circumstance. Perhaps so, in part. He did happen to drop in when I was very busy; and, what is worse, he stayed an hour and a half, which I could ill spare. We talked for some time on the proverbial platitudes

which form the usual introductions among Englishmen,— the weather-the prospects of the harvest-the public health, and half a dozen other topics, which, though very important, no one cares a doit about, and which do not tend to make our company less irksome; and then, when we got to others, your friend seemed to me a little crotchety, and of the two, -crotchets or platitudes, you know I decidedly prefer the latter, dreadful as I admit the dilemma to be. Something then, I allow, may be due to all this; but not all. Your friend is a decided gentleman, affable, intelligent; but if you ask me further, why, especially as backed by so potent an introduction,—I did not take to him more warmly, I can make you no other answer than Je ne sais pas; or quote those old lines of our school days which seem to me to contain a good deal of latent philosophy :

"I do not like you, Dr. Fell,

The reason why, I cannot tell;

But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like you, Dr. Fell."

"and so you per

"Stuff! prejudice !" methinks I hear you say; mit your heart to harbour unkind thoughts towards a stranger, on account of such silly prepossessions as these!" Stop a minute, Mr. Lecturer. Who said a word of unkindness, or even of prejudice, if that is to imply any degree of ill-will? Can you not imagine such a thing as a purely intellectual antipathy? a want of some correspondencies of taste, of sentiments, of association, which shall render intimacy as impossible as though the parties spoke different languages? Nay, more so, for minds may be congenial-the eyes and features may show it, actions may confirm it, when the tongue cannot. Cannot you, Cannot you, I say, imagine all this? can you not imagine that two men may respect each other very much, and yet wish one another at Jericho? I am sure I can; nay, I am conscious of sometimes feeling it. There is your friend, now. I would as soon do him a kind turn, if I had it in my power, as any one else of my species (not reckoning, of course, my intimate friends), but if we two were the only inhabi

tants in the world, I should wish-except when we might be of substantial use to one another-that we might see as little of each other as possible; showing ourselves once a month, say, on the opposite sides of a broad river, or two opposite mountainpeaks, and making each other a profound salaam, by aid of a telescope, in token of our continued existence, respect, and good will.

There are cases where all genial intercourse, and so all the essential pre-requisites of friendship, are out of the question; and this even where you believe another, in whom you find them not, much better than yourself; nay, whom it would require but a very little mending and darning of a few holes in their humanity to clothe in a suit which a decent sort of angels might not be absolutely ashamed of.

Friendship, my friend, is, as some one has said, or if he has not said, I will say it for him ;- no, now I think of it, I believe it was said of Matrimony (which, by the way, is friendship, plus a circumstance or two)- friendship, I say, is like a plum-pudding, a conglomerate of a highly complex and artificial character. Benevolence, indeed, must be its basis, like plums in the pudding; but there may be benevolence without friendship, though there cannot be friendship without benevolence (see Aristotle's Ethics, Cicero de Amicitiâ, and, in short, every other moralist, which I think about as useful a reference as many that the learned are in the habit of giving), and so, in addition to these plums, there are a score of other ingredients to be mingled in due proportion; to say nothing of a very long concoction, and even the pudding-bag of proximity, or at least oft-renewed presence (see Aristotle again, and not all authors this time, for the remark is original), without which friendship becomes a very wishy-washy thing ;like that plum-soup which a Turkish ambassador, ambitious of giving his English guests an English dish, presented in a tureen ; in which indeed all the ingredients of a plum-pudding-or rather the disbanded "molecules" of one- were floating, and in exact proportions too. The ambassador had unhappily forgotten in his orders to the cook the insignificant, but indispensable bag.

However, the presence of many ingredients, though they are not all equally essential, is necessary for the pudding; and it is even so also with friendship; and I maintain that there may be, and often is, an innate antipathy of mind, sentiment, or taste, without any ill-will or prejudice in the world, which makes it impossible that two men should ever be friends; no, not even by the most prolonged concoction or the very best pudding-bags in existence.

Well, well, you say, it will be different in heaven, at all events. There, all intellectual as well as all moral antipathies will be done away with, and everybody will be everybody's friend. am no sae sure o' that," as that deaf old Scotchman said, who was so fond of disputation that he used to launch this formula of obstinacy, if he only saw any one of the company making a strong affirmation, and whether he heard it or not. That nobody will be anybody's enemy in heaven, I grant; that "love unfeigned," true benevolence (glorious world!) will be constant and universal, I have no manner of doubt; that there will also be all the amenities of social life, — such true politesse that even a Frenchman shall acknowledge, without any hypocrisy of compliment, that the inhabitants of heaven are "les gentilshommes les plus polis dans tout le monde," — not excepting even Paris, — all this I believe; but whether there will not be the same intellectual sympathies necessary for the formation of close friendships, I have my doubts ; - in other words, I doubt whether the manufacture of moral plum-puddings may not go on in that world as well as this, and whether while plums shall be still the basis, concoction and pudding-bags may not be needed just as much as I don't know how it may be with you, but I can fancy a man saying even in heaven: “ Do you know angel So and So? He is really a most worthy, excellent, estimable angel, but somehow we can't get on well together; he is a fine tall creature; of a noble presence; has beautiful wings; flies well; but, to speak the truth, he is a shade too musical for me; is too fond of his singing; will sing you through the 119th Psalm without stopping, and then begin again; or he is a little too light and airy,

now.