Dun Scotus was a school boy to him. I confess, he has more than once dumb-founded me by his subtleties.—Pshaw!—It is a mortal murder of words and time to bestow them on him.

My sister is in correspondence with my new divinity. I thought proper to bestow a few gentle lashes on her, for a letter which she wrote to me, and which I mentioned in my first from Paris, insinuating her own superiority, and giving me to understand how fortunate it would be for the world should I but prove as consummate a paragon as herself. She richly deserved it, and yet I now wish I had forborne; for, if she have her sex's love of vengeance in her, she may injure me in the tenderest part. Never was woman so devoted to woman as Anna St. Ives is to Louisa. I should suspect any other of her sex of extravagant affectation; but her it is impossible to suspect: her manner is so peculiarly her own: and it comes with such unsought

for energy, that there is no resisting conviction.
I have two or three times been inclined to write and ask Louisa's pardon. But, no; that pride forbids. She dare not openly profess herself my enemy. She may insinuate, and countermine; but I have a tolerably strong dependance on my own power over Anna. She is not blind. She is the first to feel and to acknowledge superior merit; and I think I have no reason to fear repulse from any woman, whose hand I can bring myself to ask.
One of Anna's greatest perfections, with me, is the ready esteem which she entertained for me, and her not being insensible to those qualities which I flatter

myself I possess. Never yet did woman treat me with affected disdain, who did not at last repent of her coquetry.
'Tis true that Anna has sometimes piqued me, by appearing to value me more for my sister's sake even than for my own. I have been ready to say dissimulation was inseparable from woman. And yet her manner is as unlike hypocrisy as possible. I never yet could brook scorn, or neglect. I know no sensation more delicious than that of inflicting punishment for insult or for injury; 'tis in our nature.
That youngster of whom I have prated so much, his name is Frank Henley, denies this, and says that what the world calls nature is habit. He added, with some degree of sarcasm as

I thought, that it was as natural, or in his sense as habitual,