A SENTIMENTAL ADVENTURE.

BY MISS MITFORD.

THERE is a fashion in every thing-more especially every thing feminine-the very faults of the ladies (if ladies can have faults,) as well as the tenor by which those faults are distinguished, change with the changing time. The severe but honest puritan of the commonwealth was succeeded by the less rigid, but probably less sincere prude, who, from the restoration to George the Third's day, seems, if we may believe those truest painters of manners, the satirists and the comic poets, to have divided the realm of beauty with the fantastic coquette-L'Allegro reigning over one half of the female world, Il Penseroso over the other.

With the decline of the artificial comedy, these two grand divisions amongst women which had given such life to the acted drama, and had added humour to the prose of Addison, and point to the verse of Pope, gradually died away. The suspicious Husband of Dr. Hoadly, one of the wittiest and most graceful of those graceful and witty pictures of manners, which have now wholly disappeared from the comic scene, is, I think, nearly the last in which the characters are so distinguished. The wide reaching appellations of prude and

coquette, the recognised title, the definite classification, the outward profession were gone, whatever might be the case with the internal propensities; and the sex, somewhat weary it may be of finding itself called by two names, neither of them very desirable, the one being very disagreeable, and the other a little haughty, branched off into innumerable sects, with all manner of divisions and sub-divisions, and has contrived to exhibit during the last sixty or seventy years as great a variety of humours good or bad, and to derive and obtain as many epithets (most of them sufficiently ill-omened) as its various and capricious fellow-biped called man.

Amongst these epithets were two which I well remember to have heard applied some thirty years ago to more than one fair lady in the good town of Belford, but which have now passed away as completely as their companions, predecessors, coquette and prude. The "words of fear" in question were satirical and sentimental. With the first of these sad nick-names we have nothing to do. Child as I was, it seemed to me at the time, and I think so more strongly on recollection,-that in two or three instances the imputation was wholly undeserved; that a girlish gaiety of heart on the one hand, and a womanly fineness of observation on the other, gave rise to an accusation which mixes a little, and very little, cleverness with a great deal of ill nature. But with the fair satirist, be the appellation true or false, we have no concern; our business is with one lady of the class sentimental, and with one, and with one only, of those adventures to which ladies of that class are, to say the least, peculiarly liable.

Miss Selina Savage, (her detractors said that she was christened Sarah, founding upon certain testimony of I

know not what value, of aunts and god-mothers; but I abide by her own signature, as now lying before me in a fine slender Italian hand, at the bottom of a note somewhat yellow by time, but still stamped in a French device of pensées and soucis, and still faintly smelling of atar of roses; the object of the said note being to borrow “Mr. Pratt's exquisite Poem of Sympathy.") Miss Selina Savage (I hold by the autograph) was a young lady of uncertain age; there being on this point also a small variation of ten or a dozen years between her own assertions and those of her calumniators; but of a most sentimental aspect (in this respect all were agreed; tall, fair, pale, and slender, she being so little encumbered with flesh and blood, and so little tinted with the diversity of colouring thereunto belonging, so completely blond in hair, eyes, and complexion, that a very tolerable portrait of her might be cut out in white paper, provided the paper were thin enough, or drawn in chalks, white and black, upon a pale brown ground. Nothing could be too shadowy or too vapoury; the Castle Spectre, flourishing in all the glory of gauze drapery on the stage of Drury Lane-the ghosts of Ossian made out of the mists of the hills-were but types of Miss Selina Savage. Her voice was like her aspect, sighing, crying, dying; and her conversation as lachrymose as her voice; she sang sentimental songs, played sentimental airs, wrote sentimental letters, and read sentimental books; has given away her parrot for laughing, and turned off her postboy for whistling a country dance.

The abode of this amiable damsel was a small neat dwelling, somewhat inconveniently situated, at the back of the Holy Brook, between the Abbey Mills on the one side, and a great timber wharf on the other; with the

stream moving between the carriage road and the house, and nothing to unite them but a narrow foot-bridge, which must needs be crossed in all weathers. It had, however, certain recommendations which more than atoned for these defects in the eyes of its romantic mistress; three middle-sized cypress trees at one end of the court, in the front of her mansion two well-grown weeping willows; the other an address at "Holy Brook Cottage," absolutely invaluable to such a correspondence, and standing in most advantageous contrast with the streets, terraces, crescents, and places of which Belford was for the most part composed; and a very fair chance of excellent material for the body of her letters by the abundant casualties and Humane Society cases afforded by the foot-bridge-no less than one old woman, three small children, and two drunken men having been ducked in the stream in the course of one winter. Drowning would have been too much of a good thing; but of that, from the shallowness of the water, there was happily no chance.

Miss Savage, with two quiet, orderly, light-footed, and soft-spoken maidens, had been for some years the solitary tenants of the pretty cottage by the Holy Brook. She had lost her father during her early childhood; and the death of her mother (a neat quiet old lady, whose interminable carpet work is among the earliest of my recollections-I could draw the pattern now), and the absence of her brother, a married man with a large family and a prosperous business, who resided constantly in London, left the fair Selina the entire mistress of her fortune, her actions, and her residence. That she remained in Belford, although exclaiming against the place and its society-its gossiping morning visits, and its evening

card-parties, as well as to the general want of refinement amongst its inhabitants-might be imputed partly perhaps to habit, and an aversion to the trouble of moving, and partly to a violent friendship between herself and another damsel of the same class, a good deal. younger, and a great deal sillier, who lived two streets off, and whom she saw every day, and wrote to every hour.

Martha, or, as her friend chose to call her, Matilda Marshall, was the fourth or fifth daughter of a spirit merchant of the town. Frequent meetings at the circulating library introduced the fair ladies to each other, and a congeniality of taste brought about first an acquaintance, and then an intimacy, which difference of station (for Miss Savage was of the highest circle in this provincial society, and poor Martha was of no circle at all,) only seemed to cement the more firmly.

The Marshalls, flattered by Selina's notice of their daughter, and not sorry that that notice had fallen on the least useful and cheerful of the family, the one that amongst all their young people they could the most easily spare, put her time and her actions entirely into her own power, or rather into that of her patroness. Mr. Marshall, a calculating man of business, finding flirtation after flirtation go off without the conclusion matrimonial, and knowing the fortune to be considerable, began to look on Matilda as the probable heiress; and except from her youngest brother William, a clever but unlucky school boy, who delighted in plaguing his sister, and laughing at sentimental friendships, this intimacy, from which all but one member was sedulously excluded, was cherished and promoted by the whole family.

Very necessary was Miss Matilda at the Holy Brook cottage. She filled there the important parts of listener,