was too precious to be wasted in conversation with her, she soon learned to know how welcome she was to us. Her glove,--which, by-the-bye, was never tattered, though she was very poor,--was an object of regard to us. Her grandmother’s gloves would have been as unacceptable to us as any other morsel of old kid or cotton. Our heart bled for her. Now the heart may suffer much for the sorrows of a male friend, but it may hardly for such be said to bleed. We loved her, in short, as we should not have loved her, but that she was young and gentle, and could smile,--and, above all, but that she looked at us with those bright, beseeching, tear-laden eyes. Sterne, in his latter days, when very near his end, wrote passionate love-letters to various women, and has been called hard names by Thackeray,--not for writing them, but because he thus showed himself to be incapable of that sincerity which should have bound him to one love. We do not ourselves much admire the sentimentalism of Sterne, finding the expression of it to be mawkish, and thinking that too often he misses the pathos for which he strives from a want of appreciation on his own part of that which is really vigorous in language and touching in sentiment. But we think that Thackeray has been somewhat wrong in throwing that blame on Sterne’s heart which should have been attributed to his taste. The love which he declared when he was old and sick and dying,--a worn-out wreck of a man,--disgusts us, not because it was felt, or not felt, but because it was told;--and told as though the teller meant to offer more than that warmth of sympathy which woman’s strength and woman’s weakness combined will ever produce in the hearts of certain men. This is a sympathy with which neither age, nor crutches, nor matrimony, nor position of any sort need consider itself to be incompatible. It is unreasoning, and perhaps irrational. It gives to outward form and grace that which only inward merit can deserve. It is very dangerous because, unless watched, it leads to words which express that which is not intended. But, though it may be controlled, it cannot be killed. He, who is of his nature open to such impression, will feel it while breath remains to him. It was that which destroyed the character and happiness of Swift, and which made Sterne contemptible. We do not doubt that such unreasoning sympathy, exacted by feminine attraction, was always strong in Johnson’s heart;--but Johnson was strong all over, and could guard himself equally from misconduct and from ridicule. Such sympathy with women, such incapability of withstanding the feminine magnet, was very strong with Goethe,--who could guard himself from ridicule, but not from misconduct. To us the child of whom we are speaking--for she was so then--was ever a child. But she bore in her hand the power of that magnet, and we admit that the needle within our bosom was swayed by it. Her story,--such as we have to tell it,--was as follows.