out again two or three times, while, I suppose, some words of magic are repeated, and the marriage is done. The Doge then returns to St. Mark, accompanied by his train of attendants, but without his bride. With illusions like this, men have often governed men.

"You may imagine, my dear father, that if I began my letter from the summit of St. Mark's, I have not stayed there to finish it! It is rather long; but I had been so astonished at all I saw and heard on arriving here, that I was eager to inform myself upon points respecting which I was in ignorance; and without fancying you as unlearned as myself, I yet wished to share with you all I gained of information, thinking that, as you had not reached as far as Venice in your Italian campaigns, you would not be displeased that your son should refresh your memory, concerning facts of its history you might have forgotten. I have another chapter upon Venice for you still.

THE POOR RELATION.

BY ABBOTT LEE.

EVERYBODY was freshly dressed, and sat as stiffly as possible for the preservation of their good looks. It was the freezing, cutting, cooling, chilling half-hour before dinner, in which the only amusement consists in personal criticisms. The ladies looked at each other's sleeves, and investigated their shape, speculated upon the genuineness of their gems, whether the diamonds were real or only paste; wondered how each other could contrive to spend so much money, and how she could manage to get it, and yet make such a figure of herself. The gentlemen pulled up their shirt collars, and put their ringed fingers through their perfumed hair; stole looks at themselves in the mirrors; and yet time seemed to stand still. The hands of the time-piece must certainly have been stationary: it had stopped; it was backward: it was much later than it indicated. Pity that time, so much more valuable, should ever be heavier than gold.

For our own part we are, even in this late date of our own life, still astonished at the philanthropy of the world. People may talk of its unkindness, and want of benevolence, and hardness of heart, and so forth, but we say that its urbanity and tenderness are quite wonderful. There was not one of the guests that day assembled in the drawing-room of Swan Vale, who had not privately declared, that it was the greatest bore and trouble to them in the world to accept the invitation of its mistress to dinner; and Mrs. Mackillop, the lady hostess, had positively affirmed in strictest confidence to every member of her family, that it was the greatest expense, and the greatest annoyance, and the greatest labour, and the greatest nuisance to have them; and yet when they met, every one of the invited guests individually and collectively declared that it was the greatest pleasure on earth to visit Mrs. Mackillop; and Mrs. Mackillop positively asseverated that she had not a satisfaction in the world so large as that of seeing her dear friends assemble round her table. Now this is what we call an emulation in magnanimity and generosity, considering how particularly disagreeable it must have been to both sides.

Now we know that if the preluding minutes of the half-hour before dinner are not honey-drops to the guests, they are certainly poisondrops to the hostess. She is so afraid that the cook will make a mess of things, that what ought to be hid will be shown, and what ought to be shown will be hid; that her visitors will spy out some corner of nakedness, and that she may not well have spread out her field of plenty; that they will by mistake call her poor, and mean, and shabby, instead of rich, and liberal, and hospitable; that, poor thing, she suffers a very miserable sort of martyrdom indeed.

Thus sat Mrs. Mackillop, of Swan Vale, in her drawing-room, in the midst of about twenty guests, trying to smile and smile, and getting all the while a most particularly uncomfortable red face; for, May 1843.-VOL. XXXVI.-NO. CXLV.

G

in addition to the nuisance of having so many guests who had come, she had the additional nuisance of expecting two more who had not come, and she knew that her dinner was frizzing and burning, and soddening, and drying and spoiling; and she knew that her cook was in a most terrible passion, being, like all her profession, of a most pepperish temperament; and she felt the mercury of her own nature rising very high, and indexing itself in her face, and yet she persevered in smiling and smiling on.

The two guests Mrs. Mackillop was expecting were a pair of oppositions. The one rich, the other poor; the one masculine, the other feminine; the one conferring honour, the other receiving it. The first, to be more explicit, was a certain large landed proprietor, a Squire Harrowby, who, having once casually said that Rachel Mackillop, the eldest of the Mackillop brood, was rather pretty, it had been repeated that she was pretty, very pretty, interesting, beautiful, delightful, divine, and, snow-ball fashion, when the rumour had rolled up to the doors of the matronly mamma, it had swelled into the magnitude of a mountain of love, and requiring, as the lady thought, her most especial attention; thereupon had originated this invitation to dinner.

The second in this duet of invitations being of the feminine gender, was neither more nor less than a Poor Relation, whom Mrs. Mackillop thought might be made generously, that is gratuitously, useful. Considering that it was one of the misfortunes of a family to have poor relations, since even of the boys it was impossible to make doctors, and lawyers, and clergymen, or even clerks, of them all; and that the long continuance of peace, until the lucky Chinese and Affghan wars, prevented them being killed off half fast enough; and that finding wifeplaces for all the girls was utterly beyond hope, so few vacancies occurring for upper servants of that class, the club-houses also helping to carry out the Malthusian malversations, Mrs. Mackillop considered herself engaged in a work of most perfect charity, in striking out any feasible plan of appropriating even one of the least of those supernumeraries so much in the way of the world, and thus so very kindly taking her out of its elbowing. The plan which she had thus generously, disinterestedly, and ingeniously struck off was neither more nor less than promoting her to the office of an honorary governess, by which, of course, we mean that highly genteel state of unpaid laboriousness which is its own reward-if rewarded at all.

Mrs. Mackillop was highly delighted with her own generosity and magnanimity in thus providing a place for this atom in the creation, this speck of permitted dust in the splendours of her mansion. It was so very kind to let the poor thing come down to them, she would enjoy herself so much, and she would make a better governess than the creatures out of chandlers' shops. And then she had met with so much ingratitude-governesses were such a vile set, such a discontented race-she had had seven in fifteen months; nothing could please them-nothing was good enough. And so happy as they might be! Only thirteen children in the nursery; and though seven of them were boys, and able to amuse themselves, only requiring to be taken care of, and the girls being merely six, and only needing to be set to

work after study hours; yet the ungrateful governesses were so eaten up with nonsense and affectation, that they presumed to think they had too much to do, as if the mere washing, and dressing, and teaching, and making and mending, necessary for only thirteen delightful children, was even worth mentioning! Well, she would invite this Poor Relation down; and if she found her grateful and passable, slie would install her in the happy position of honorary governess. It would be quite an amusement for her to instruct the dear children; but then she had not opened out this brilliant prospect to the happy elect: she had only invited her to spend a week or two down in the country with them, that she might inspect her. She might turn out to be coarse and common; she might be raw and rude, with red hands and large feet; she might open her mouth wide, and speak loud, and eat a great deal, and be a horror altogether; she might even be a vulgar blowsy, and turn out quite low, in which case she must go back again a bad bargain. But if she were modest and tractable, and wellbehaved, why then she would make her a present at the end of the year, and give her any article of dress that she did not quite like, and pay for her washing, for she had a pleasure in being generous, as nobody could know so well as herself.

But how provoking that the Poor Relation should arrive at so horridly mal-a-propos a time as just when they were waiting dinner for Squire Harrowby! A dozen times had the lodge-bell rang, a dozen times had the gate opened, a dozen times had Mrs. Mackillop been disappointed. But, at length, again the bell rang, and again the dogs barked; and the servant who kept the lodge opened one half of the folding gates. There was a cloud of dust, and in the midst of it stood a vulgar stage coach, with the greatest possible number of outside passengers. Poor Mrs. Mackillop, having a certain value for her own gentility, was considerably shocked at the sight, being, as she was, taken unawares, and surrounded by so many dear friends, who would all be so delighted to see her mortified; but her chagrin increased, when she beheld, squeezing out from among the outsides, first one half, and then the other, of a very ordinarily dressed person, whom she saw at a glance, with infinite horror, could be none other than her own Poor Relation.

"Low, vulgar creature!" exclaimed Mrs. Mackillop to herself, of course so as nobody could hear her, "to come in that manner to disgrace us! Why could she not take a place in the inside at least! or she might have had a post-chaise for the last few miles, so as to have presented herself decently! And, there, I declare, as ill-luck will have it, there is Squire Harrowby just driving up in his curricle!"'

Just so it was: the Poor Relation was caught in the fact of getting down from the coach-top as the gentleman dashed up, and he was obliged to wait whilst she descended, and that was rather a tedious process for what with the difficulty of putting one foot here, and another there, standing on a ledge here, and a spoke there, it was some time before she rested upon terra firma: but at last she arrived safely down on the ground, and then came the search for her goods and chattels. These could not be forthcoming or come-at-able without uncording the huge heap of luggage that was piled up on the top

of the coach, to find the individual box that was the Poor Relation's individual property; and after this followed a search in the boot for a particular bundle and a crushed-in bandbox; and then an umbrella was required to make up the muster-roll, and a small basket, and a brown-paper parcel, and a boa, and a bag, and a warm shawl for travelling in, though everybody was being roasted alive: and, finally, the Poor Relation, having run over the inventory of her property, and finding it all correct, with the improvement of a few breakings and batterings, took out her purse to bestow her liberality upon the coachman and guard, and having presented each of them with a shilling's worth of the face of our most gracious majesty Queen Victoria, she was treated with a most elegant and eloquent harangue from both the gentlemen, on the meanness and shabbiness of insulting them with shillings, and the desirableness of having them exchanged for half-crowns; to which having presumed to make some slight objection, she was treated to some further personalities, which very ably helped the heat to send the blood up into her face, but did not by any means persuade her to dive her hand more deeply into her purse, thereby manifesting an obstinacy of disposition which the gentlemen of the road were very far from approving, and who, in spite of their benevolent wishes to teach her better, were at last obliged to jump up, the one behind and the other before; and the guard blew a deafening din upon his horn, and the coachman flourished his whip, making at the same time that sort of free-masonic sign of the elbow with which the regulars on the road distinguish their brother whips-which condescension, however, Squire Harrowby did not deign to notice; and having thus aggravated another cloud of dust, the stage-coach dashed off, leaving the Poor Relation standing in the middle of the road.

As soon as the cloud of dust had so far subsided as to give the Poor Relation a chance of seeing out of her eyes, she cast them round by way of reconnoitring what was next best to be done; but as Squire Harrowby seemed to have some slight difficulty in keeping his two fine bays under proper control-they finding it very amusing to champ, and prance, and prove their own importance by raising a commotion, and showing indubitable signs of impatience-emotions of mind common to man as well as beast, and in which Squire Harrowby and Squire Harrowby's servant both sympathized-and altogether uniting to make the Poor Relation aware of the difficulty of her position, and she not very well knowing which way to turn, while the porter belonging to the lodge throwing open the other half of the gate, there seemed no other obstruction to the gentleman driving his curricle, and himself, and his bays, and his servant, triumphantly in, saving and excepting the slight impediment of being obliged, in doing so, merely to drive over the Poor Relation.

"Be so good as to stand on one side, young woman," said Squire Harrowby.

"Get out of the way, can't you, young woman ?" called out Squire Harrowby's servant.

"Don't you see-don't you—that you'll be run over ?" shouted the man at the gate, and thereupon he very unceremoniously gave a jump, and clutched hold of her arm, and huddled her on one side, and scram