"This could not last: my mistress could little brook contempt, especially when she felt it to be deserved; her cheek lost its bloom, her eye its lustre; and when her beauty became less brilliant, she no longer possessed the only attraction which had made the captain her lover. He grew weary of her, soon took occasion to quarrel with her, and she was left without friends, without income, and without character. I was at length torn from her: it nearly broke my springs to part with her; but I was despatched to the bazaar in London, and saw no more of my lady. (_To be continued_.) * * * * * FASHIONABLE NOVELS. It is well that hard words break no bones, else two or three gentlemen of literary notoriety would be in a sorry plight after reading the following passage in a recent _Magazine_. We stand by, and like the fellow in the play, bite our thumb:-- "Surely, surely, all men, women, and children, not cursed with the fatuity that would become a vice-president of the Phrenological Society, must by this time be about heartsick of what are called Novels of Fashionable Life. Only two men of any pretensions to superiority of talent have had part in the uproarious manufacture of this ware, that has been dinned in our ears by trumpet after trumpet, during the last six or seven years. Mr. Theodore Hook began the business--a man of such strong native sense and thorough knowledge of the world as it is, that we cannot doubt the _coxcombry_ which has drawn so much derision on his _sayings_ and _doings_ was all, to use a phrase which he himself has brought into fashion, _humbug_. He could not cast his keen eyes over any considerable circle of society in this country, without perceiving the melancholy fact, that the British nation labours under a universal mania for gentility--all the world hurrying and bustling in the same idle chase--good honest squires and baronets, with pedigrees of a thousand years, and estates of ten thousand acres--ay, and even noble lords--yea, the noblest of the noble themselves (or at least their ladies), rendered fidgety and uncomfortable by the circumstance of their not somehow or other belonging to one particular little circle in London. Comely round-paunched parsons and squireens, again, all over the land, eating the bread of bitterness, and drinking the waters of sorrow, because they are, or think they are, tipt the cold shoulder by these same honest squires and baronets, &c. &c. &c. who, excluded from Almack's, in their own fair turn and rural sphere enact nevertheless, with much success, the part of _exclusives_--and so downwards--down to the very verge of dirty linen. The obvious facility of practising lucratively on this prevailing folly--of raising 700_l_., 1000_l_., or 1500_l_. per _series_, merely by cramming the mouths of the asinine with mock-majestic details of fine life--this found favour with an indolent no less than sagacious humorist; and the fatal example was set. Hence