a wide range of subject and feeling; gossip about the Dilkes and other acquaintances; an account of the humours of his sea-passage from Inverness to London; the unruffled allusion to the Tory reviews from which we have already quoted; two long and curious sex-haunted passages, one expressing his admiration of the same East Indian cousin of the Reynoldses, 'not a Cleopatra, but at least a Charmian,' whom we have found mentioned already in a letter to Reynolds, the other telling what promised to be an equivocal adventure, but turned out quite conventionally and politely, with a mysterious lady acquaintance met once before at Hastings; a rambling discussion on the state of home and foreign politics; a rhapsody, or as he would have called it rant, in a mounting strain of verse which rings like a boy's voice singing in alt, prophesying that the child to be born to George and his wife shall be the first American poet; then more babble about friends and acquaintances; then, as if he knew that the invincible thing, the love-god whose spell he had always at once dreaded and longed for, were hovering and about to swoop, he tries to re-assure himself by calling up the reasons why marriage and the life domestic are not for him. The Charmian passage and the passage in which he seeks to stave off the approach of love are among the best known in his letters, but nevertheless the most necessary to quote:-- She has a rich eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. When she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the Beauty of a Leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any Man who may address her--from habit she thinks that nothing _particular_. I always find myself more at ease with such a woman; the picture before me always gives me a life and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or on a tremble. I forget myself entirely because I live in her. You will by this time think I am in love with her; so before I go further I will tell you I am not--she kept me awake one Night as a tune of Mozart's might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman the very 'yes' and 'no' of whose Lips is to me a Banquet. I don't cry to take the Moon home with me in my Pocket nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I like her and her like because one has no _sensations_--what we both are is taken for granted. You will suppose I have by this had much talk with her--no such thing--there are the Miss Reynoldses on the look out. They think I don't admire her because I did not stare at her. They call her a flirt to me. What a want of knowledge! She walks across a room in such a Manner that a Man is drawn towards her with a magnetic Power. This they call flirting! They do not know things.