in a kind of volatility that I cannot describe better, than by comparing her to the Allegro, and Maria to the Penseroso of Milton. Each for the time claims the preference.

Nec diversa tamen: qualem decet esse sororum.
BUT Maria's hopeless love may tend, at present, to heighten the opposition.
FOR me, I still continue heart-whole. The destinies have not yet made a lover of me. The only concern that engrosses my attention, is the fate of my dear friend, and poor Maria. I know she will never love Maitland, and in any case but the present, I am sure my father would not oppose her inclination. I never saw him so bent on any affair, as on this; and though old Maitland's letter had a great deal of frigidity in it, it is only owing to his ridiculous attempt to bring every thing to the test of mathematical demonstration; for, they have both intended the match for some years. The nature of their attachment you will judge from the following narration. I had it from my

father, one evening, as we were conversing on this subject.
BEING both in the same class at school, the mutual assistance which they afforded each other in their studies was the first ground of particular intimacy. Possessed of nearly the same dispositions, and equally unacquainted with the world, they spent their early youth among the heroes of antiquity, and incited each other to emulate their virtues. But they were chiefly enamoured with those pleasing descriptions of retirement and solitude with which the poets abound, and from them formed the idea of a kind of life that seldom exists but in the imagination. Instead of wishing to cut a figure in the world, their desires were fixed on some peaceful retreat, where their employment might be to tend their flocks,

and repose on the verdant banks of a rivulet,
Far from the busy world, and all its cares.

THESE ideas were still more enforced by the rural situation of the school, which gave them an opportunity of forming grottoes, and other poetical edifices; and there was scarce a grove or stream in the neighbourhood that did not, at one time or other, afford them a subject for an ode.
AFTER passing two years in this sweet delusion, my father began to awake, and consider himself as an inhabitant of this world; but it was not so with Maitland. He had, indeed, discovered, that the Heathen mythology was a fiction; for his master had not sense to put him into the rational way of studying it. It was therefore no longer the