of service in the way which would best promote Lady Paulina's real interests. The first suggestion was that it came from an emissary of her husband's, who had discovered her flight. This was followed by a hope that it might be written by an agent of Avondel's. In the first case, escape was impossible, in the last an immediate interview was highly desirable ; she therefore ordered that the writer should be admitted. It was no other than Lady Selina herself, who having discovered from the loquacious communications of Mr. Sandford's servant to her own footman, some particulars of his master's frolic, and Lady Paulina's present situation, resolved immediately to visit her, prompted by her native goodness, and a hope that she might be instrumental in changing the criminal agonies of rage, disappointment, and despair, into that

sorrow which terminates in hope and

peace.

Conscious that the mutual attachment between her and the earl must be known to Paulina, and consequently might impede the success of her negotiation, she wished at first to conceal her name; but the Italian's piercing eyes, quickened by love and jealousy, soon discovered that the fine ruin on which she gazed, whose benign countenance and graceful manner announced superior qualities, could be no other than the early and indeed only real possessor of Lord Avondel's heart. She viewed her therefore as the person who had defeated all her machinations, and ruined all her dearest hopes; and with a determined infatuation, not . uncommon to extreme depravity, she resolved to believe her guilty, or at least capable of all the crimes with which she had slanderously aspersed.

her in order to bend the stubborn honour of her paramour, and make him the complete tool of her nefarious purposes.

The contrast which these ladies ex-. hibited was complete in all those points which can shew the effect of different principles on equal degrees of intellect. Paulina employed all the power of her capacious mind to gratify her passions, which by indulgence were become insatiable. Selina had naturally strong feelings, but by the aid of religion they became so subdued that they proved assistants to her in her heaven-ward course, converting what reflection told her was a duty into a pleasure. The former centered all her wishes in self-enjoyment, varied indeed by the different shades which it received from vanity, ambition, or libertine inclinations; but whether she sought love or fame, the applause of

thousands, or the heart of a forbidden object; whether, like Cleopatra by the side of Anthony, presiding at the festival in eastern magnificence, or as Rosamond, immured with her doating Plantagenet in "Woodstock's bower," self-enjoyment was what she ever aimed at. Regardless of others, save as they ministered to the object which she had in view, she heeded not subjecting a high-minded nobleman to the horrors of long remorse, and stripping the man whose virtues and fame she affected to revere, of every appellative but that of her lover.

But as the self denying Selina had submitted to suffer rather than expose her near connections to disgrace or injury, so it was her consolation during her clouded and perilous pilgrimage, that she had aimed at doing all the good in her power, not only in words but in reality, preferring the.

welfare and wishes of others to her own. These different motives of action made the Italian crafty and specious, and the English lady kind and sincere. Both were eminently graceful, but in Paulina's address there was a meretricious splendor, an aim at pleasing, a restless assiduity of fascination, which betrayed a sinister design. Selina's manner discovered that innate benevolence which without courting applause insures affection, by evincing that disinterested and enlarged regard for her fellow creatures which we consider as a marked characteristic of those exalted beings who minister to the designs of Divine Providence.

Though I might extend these reflections to the length of one of Plutarch's parallels, there is only one more point of resemblance and dissimilitude in which I shall consider