Lady Maria Sneachy, a real, dazzling, brilliant, smiling beauty! What large, imperial eyes; what a magnificent neck and brow; and how haughtily she lifts her fair head with its weight of glancing black ringlets! She seems to scorn the earth which her small foot presses, and to look round in supreme contempt of beggarly man and all his trifling concerns. He may gaze at her, worship her, but let him aspire no higher. The laugh of satire that can burst from those lips is cutting to the last degree. I have seen many a wretch writhing under it, and pitied the despair with which he turned away from the royal coquette to seek happiness in a less splendid and less disdainful form. People say that Maria has found her tamer now. I know not how that is, but I think the King of Angria is too well satisfied with his present Queen, who fits herself to him and all his proud strange ways more perfectly every day, to choose even so grand a successor as Maria Sneachy would be. Augustus, Marquis of Rosendale—young Highland Red-Deer! Fidena may be proud of his son. I never saw a child who better merited the epithet, ‘handsome,’ than does this juvenile prince. All his limbs and features are so round and regular. Look at those fleshy, plump arms naked to the shoulder; on that fair and florid face with its fearless blue eye, and the curly grace of his plentiful light hair; on that bold white forehead which will be bared yet to the mountain winds of his fatherland when he fronts them in the storm of the chase, and to the keener gales of war when he follows the sound of the trumpet and charges either to the rescue or ruin of that banner whose orb is rising, but which ere then will be in its glowing noontide. Prince John should watch Augustus; let him not follow his young god-father in infancy or he will do it hereafter in manhood. Here the second volume closes. I now take up the first.