and elevated her to what is often more degrading and worse paid, the dignity of a companion. The education she received here was such as might be expected at the hands of a fine lady of the last century. She read all the stilted and not too delicate romances of the day--a course of reading which not only kills time, but which generally destroys the student. It at least did not improve the spelling of the now ‘young lady’; for to the last, though she talked like Aspasia, she spelled as badly as Caroline of Brunswick--a light fault in a day when countesses spelt _Physician_ with an _F_, and thought _G_ was the first letter of _Augustus_! The house of Emma’s patroness was the resort of all the great players, poets, and literati of the day. It was the ‘Gore House’ of its time: perhaps, its glories ended as ignobly. As a home and an asylum for a young girl full of beauty, and given to impulses which she knew not how to govern, it deserved not the name. The poor thing was made the Cynthia of the minute: the _Trissotins_ dedicated sonnets to her; her beauty was deified; incense was daily offered to her by fools and knaves, and even by those who were neither: but yesterday she was toiling for wages, and perhaps complacently receiving the coarse compliments of liveried worshippers: to-day she was tended on by delicate hands, her smiles eagerly sought after, her presence acknowledged by a buzz of admiration, her wit celebrated by the ecstatic praises of the witty, and her intellect directed to everything save to the study of divine things. She loved the refinement which concealed the vice yet unknown to her: what was so pleasant could hardly be sinful, for it brought no remorse. The foolish virgin lacked a _man_ at hand to tell her that she was neglecting her lamp; and it was only in after life, when intellect was superseded by cleverness and reflection made her matured beauty all the more radiant, that she sorrowingly acknowledged that to her first patroness had been sacrificed the morning of her youth, and that every opportunity neglected had been fruitful in a multitude of after sorrows.