"Ages back" she certainly did _not_ live, for the book is dated "1637," and "yesterday" is absurd. But that her eyes were bright,--nay, that they were particularly lively and vivacious, even as they are in the sanguine sketches of Antoine Watteau a hundred years afterwards, I am "confidous"--as Mrs. Slipslop would say. For my theory (in reality a foregone conclusion which I shrink from dispersing by any practical resolvent) is, that Mile. de Mons was some delightful seventeenth--century French child, to whom the big volume had been presented as a picture-book. I can imagine the alert, strait-corseted little figure, with ribboned hair, eagerly craning across the tall folio; and following curiously with her finger the legends under the copper "figures,"--"Narcisse en fleur," "Ascalaphe en hibou," "Jason endormant le dragon,"--and so forth, with much the same wonder that the Sinne-Beelden of Jacob Cats must have stirred in the little Dutchwomen of Middelburg. There can be no Mlle. de Mons but this,--and for me she can never grow old! Note: [1] This quatrain has the distinction of having been touched upon by Thackeray. When Mr. Locker's manuscript went to the Cornhill Magazine in 1860, it ran thus: Did she live yesterday, or ages sped? What colour were the eyes when bright and waking? And were your ringlets fair? Poor little head! --Poor little heart! that long has done with aching. Sometimes it comes to pass that the association is of a more far-fetched and fanciful kind. In the great Ovid it lies in an inscription: in my next case it is "another-guess" matter. The folio this time is the _Sylva Sylvarum_ of the "Right Hon. Francis Lo. Verulam. Viscount St. Alban," of whom some people still prefer to speak as Lord Bacon. 'Tis only the "sixt Edition"; but it was to be bought at the Great Turk's Head, "next to the Mytre Tauerne" (not the modern pretender, be it observed!), which is in itself a feature of interest. A former possessor, from his notes, appears to have been largely preoccupied with that ignoble clinging to life which so exercised Matthew Arnold, for they relate chiefly to laxative simples for medicine; and he comforts himself, in April, 1695, by transcribing Bacon's reflection that "a Life led in _Religion_ and in _Holy Exercises_" conduces to longevity,--an aphorism which, however useful as an argument for length of days, is a rather remote reason for religion. But what to me is always most seductive in the book is, that to this edition (not copy, of course) of 1651 Master Izaak Walton, when he came, in his _Compleat Angler_ of 1653, to discuss such abstract questions as the transmission of sound under water, and the ages of carp and pike, must probably have referred. He often mentions "Sir Francis Bacon's" _History of Life and Death_, which is included in the volume. No doubt it would be more reasonable and more "congruous" that Bacon's book should suggest Bacon. But there it is.