But, after all, Miss Nancy is not a popular man. He will probably live and die an old bachelor, because all the women will persist in laughing at him. He is certainly good-looking, his dress is unexceptionable, his manners are "as good as they make them," and his morals are as proper as his manners; yet I have not yet seen the woman who would speak a pleasant word of my friend. He is decidedly a "woman's man," yet no woman will own him, and no woman feels comfortable with him. His language is so carefully guarded against all impropriety of style and structure, that she feels as if he were criticizing every word she utters, as well as measuring his own. His manners are so very proper that they are formal and constrained, and make her uncomfortable. His sentiments and opinions are so very conservative, that they have no vitality in them. With a curious perverseness, the most gentle and accomplished women will turn from him with a sense of relief, to join in the society of a hearty fellow with a loud laugh and a dash of slang, and a free and easy way with him. It may be difficult to explain all this, but it is true. An exceedingly proper man is never a popular man. That life which is controlled by rigid and unvarying rules, and regulated by conventionalities in every minute particular, and restrained in every impulse by notions of propriety, is unlovely and unnatural, and can never he otherwise. The instincts of men are always right in this and all cognate matters. All formalism is offensive to good taste. The painter does not study landscape in a garden. Formal isles, closely-trimmed trees, rose hushes on the top of tall sticks, flowers tied to supports, vines trained upon trellises, lakes with clipped and pebbled margins and India-rubber swans--these are not picturesque. There is no more inspiration in them than there would be in a row of tenement houses in the city. The painter looks for beauty out where nature reigns undisturbed amid her imperfections,--where the aisles are made by the deer going to his lick; where the trees are never trimmed save by the lightning or the hurricane; where the rose-bushes spread their branches and the vines trail themselves at liberty; and where the lake looks up into the faces of trees centuries old, and hems itself in with thickets of alders and green reaches of flags and rushes, and throbs to the touch of the mountain breeze, while on its bosom "The black duck, with her glossy breast Sits swinging silently."