moment. Her heart was cheered by a sentiment of filial piety, similar to that so beautifully expressed by Scott's Ellen: My soul, though feminine and weak, Can image his; even as the lake, Itself disturb'd by slightest stroke, Reflects the invulnerable rock. Notwithstanding Adelaide's best endeavours to persuade herself the Webberlys _en masse_ were a pleasant family, and not less amiable than agreeable, she now found them more intolerable than ever. Mr. Webberly's attentions were as incessant as disgusting, and to her astonishment his mother no longer gave them overt opposition. His sisters, on the contrary, were more than ever devoured by "proud spleen and burning envy;" but they excited in her mind only the most profound compassion. Pity is said to be near akin to love; it is sometimes however very closely allied to that mournful pardon we grant to a character, whose irremediable defects excite our unqualified hopeless disapprobation. As for Mrs. Sullivan, Adelaide felt grieved she could not like her, for she at least had the feelings of a mother; and where is the character so degraded, that these will not give a claim to our love, to our veneration? When she saw this poor woman, full of love and pride in her elder children, pour forth her fondness on them, and saw the ungrateful objects of her tenderness insultingly disdain it, because it did not appear in the language and gestures of what they supposed to be fashion, she redoubled her attentions, and her sweetly soothing manners, sometimes chased the starting tears from the offended mother's eye, sometimes made them flow from the bitterness of the comparison they caused her to make. But when, softened by compassion, Adelaide was reproaching herself for her want of liking to a woman, who, though a mistaken, was an affectionate mother, some trait of ostentatious arrogant despotism to those not united by ties of relationship sent her benevolent feelings, with accelerated motion, back to the source of kindness from whence they had begun to flow. Vulgarity alone was no crime in her mind; she considered it merely as an accident to which certain conditions are liable, and, therefore, when it was an accompaniment of worth, she did not _dare_ to feel it a fit subject of contempt. She was too noble in soul, too pious in heart, to presume on her accidental advantages of education, to despise "the pure in spirit," who are, however lowly in earthly station, glorious in the approving smile of Heaven.