The very words modern and newfangled are in themselves expressions of condemnation. The modern writers merely string together a multitude of words; they have no ideas at all, or if they have by accident any thing like an idea or thought, they overwhelm it with a host of unmeaning words. If Milton's Paradise Lost, or Spenser's Fairy Queen, or Young's Night Thoughts, had been written by any of the writers of the present day, they would have spun the same materials out to a most immoderate and unreasonable length; and if Lord Byron had been the author of the Iliad, he would have made of it a poem as long as Childe Harold; or if any of our modern novel-writers had taken the subject of Clarissa Harlowe, there is every reason to suppose that they would have extended it to the dimensions of Rees's Cyclopedia. The taste of the daughters of Lady Woodstock did not much approve modern literature; and no wonder, when we consider the emptiness and wordiness of the present race of writers; and as to modern periodicals, where is there one that can for a moment compete with what the Lady's Magazine was sixty years ago? But the young ladies were not altogether ignorant of modern literature. They were generally acquainted with the names and titles of new books, and could speak very fluently concerning them at their first appearance, but afterwards they made it a rule to forget them. Lady Woodstock and her daughters were very religious, according to the present fashion. They were not religious purely for fashion's sake, but merely according to the fashion. They certainly believed themselves to be religious, and so far they certainly were. One of the first thoughts that entered their minds on arriving in town was to engage a pew at church. Lady Woodstock herself would have been as religious, let the fashion be as it might; but we believe that the young ladies admired the popular preacher as much for his popularity as for his piety. There was to the west of Temple Bar, but how far to the west and in what street our informant has not been careful enough to inform us, a very handsome chapel of ease, answering by its comfortable internal accommodations most completely to its name; at which chapel there officiated a preacher whose discourses were as soft and beautiful as the velvet cushion on which his elbows reclined, and light as the feathers wherewith that cushion was stuffed. Lady Woodstock was so far religious as to regard the church-prayers as a matter of devotion, but the young ladies rather considered the sermon as a matter of diversion. They were most skilful sermon critics, very loudly praising zeal and seriousness, and very acute in detecting grammatical errors. It was very amusing to hear the young ladies on Sunday morning tumultuously and in concert gabbling forth the praises or dispraises of the sermon of the day, and criticising the air, tone, aspect and manner of the reverend officiating divine. "What a delightful sermon we have