There was a bronze group by POLLET among the specimens of sculpture in the French _Salon_, some twenty years ago,--"It may be more or less an hour or so," as the poet sings,--representing a female form being carried upwards in the embrace of a rather evil-looking Angel. It illustrated a poem by the Vicomte ALFRED DE VIGNY, which I remember reading, in consequence of this very statue having come into my possession (it was afterwards sold at Messrs. CHRISTIE, MANSON & WOODS, under the style and title of "Lot 121, _Elsa_"), and it occurs to me that it was on precisely the same theme as the other ALFRED's--not the _Vicomte_ but _Mister_ ALFRED AUSTIN's--"_The Tower of Babel_," which I have just read with much pleasure, and, with some profit; the moral, as I take it, being favourable to the Temperance cause, as a warning against all spirits, good, bad, or indifferent. _Afrael_, the inhabitant of a distant star, falls in love with _Noema_, the wife of the atheistical Babelite _Aran_, to whom she has borne a son, aged in the poem, as far as I can make out, about eight years, and a fine boy for that. Anyhow, it makes _Noema_ at least twenty-five, supposing she married at sweet seventeen, and, indeed, she alludes to herself in the poem as no longer in her first youth. Well, _Aran_, who is very far from being a domestic character, is struck down by avenging lightning at the destruction of the Tower of Babel, and _Noema_ is left a widow, with her child, who has been protected in the _mêlée_ by the Spirit _Afrael's_ taking him out of it, and restoring him to his mother's arms. When, after this, the infatuated spirit-lover _Afrael_ requests _Noema_ to say the word which shall make a man of him, and a husband of him too at the same time, she modestly refuses, until she has had a decent time to order her widow's weeds at her milliner's and wear them for about a month or so, at the expiration of which interval _Afrael_ may, if he be still of the same mind, call in again, and pop the question.