length softened the lustre of his dark eyes, his nose was an aquiline of peculiar neatness, and his mouth small almost to a fault. He was plump, not to say fat, for his age, but his legs were of a remarkable slimness, tapering down to the most surprisingly minute feet that ever a gentleman stood on. His hands were as exquisite as every thing else about him, small and white, with fingers that seemed fitted only for feminine tasks. It was pretty

to see how he carried these members before him, the one deposited on the other in a way that would have been droll if it had not been engaging. Still prettier it was to see him undulate, with a curtsying sort of gait, across a drawing-room, or about a teatable, for it was only in the street that he could be said to walk, and, even there, there was a sort of virginal primness in his movements exceedingly agreeable to behold. That he slept

with his hair in papers we are not in a position to state with certainty; if he did, he kept it a profound secret. All that we know positively respecting the ornament in question is, that it was very long, and black, and silky; if, with these qualities, it did not curl naturally, we think it was all the more natural that its proprietor should curl it.

Mr. Julius Gullingsworth was, furthermore, given, in a somewhat unusual degree for a gentleman, to blushing, though, singularly enough, only when conversing with individuals of his own sex. There was, at such times, a charming little air of flutter about him, which in a young lady you would call missish. Within the memory of his oldest acquaintance he had not been known to throw, when sitting, one leg over the other; he always sat with his hands in his lap, and his feet a little under his chair, and, when you spoke to him, he looked as if he thought you were going to ask him for a kiss. In fact, the whole personality of Mr. Julius Gullingsworth was so soft and delightful that the suspicion might now and then have arisen that he was really a lady, had he not fortunately possessed a superb pair of whiskers, the objects of his most affectionate care, which-fine, and glossy, and black, as the locks that curled about his forehead-formed a complete frame to his face, and marked the beautiful exact

ness of its circular contour, to which we have already referred.

It was curious that few men ever thought of talking any thing but nonsense to Mr. Julius Gullingsworth, or of addressing him otherwise than in that tone of badinage which one naturally adopts in entertaining a very pretty girl with a very empty head. What the generality of ladies thought of him we are unable to state on any conclusive authority; but it was his own distinct and melancholy impression that he was the object of a hopeless passion to nine out of ten of them, at least; an impression which, if not statistically correct, was yet highly excusable, because almost inevitable, in a gentleman who was himself so like a lady, and who felt a lively emotion of tenderness at work in his bosom whenever he encountered his own features in the glass.

Yet circumstances had occurred in the life of Mr. J. G. which might have modified his views on this subject. It was a fact not known to his most intimate friends, not even to Captain Dunham Browne, that the same secret drawer of the rosewood cabinet, in which his spectacles lay concealed from impertinent observation, contained also five different carefully folded papers, of slightly unctuous appearance, with five different names, all terminating in the first letter of the alphabet, written upon them, and five different locks of hair (a black, three browns, and we will call it a golden) within. Five dates were inscribed on these interesting envelopes, covering a space of about eight years, from Mr. J. G.'s sixteenth to his four and twentieth. For-to repose a confidence in the reader, of which we should be sorry indeed not to suppose him worthy-a confidence reposed in our breast by Mr. J. G. himself notwithstanding his asseverations to the contrary, indulged in to Captain Dunham Browne, Mr. J. G. had loved. Arborea was not his first love, but his sixth. Five bright creatures, one after another, at intervals averaging a year and seven or eight months, had bestowed on him locks of their respective hairs; and to each of them, in turn, he had declared-Mr. J. G. being a gentleman whose jokes, when he permitted himself to make such things, were on the same scale

as the almost preternaturally small mouth they came out of-that this gift of a lock from her head conveyed to him the beatific assurance that he had found the key to her heart, and that, under these circumstances, he felt his happiness as secure as lock and key could make it. But perhaps he had been hasty in thus arguing from a lock to a key, from head to heart. He had the locks, that was certain; but that he ever had the keys is not so evident. So much was matter of notoriety among his friends, that he had been, or believed himself to be, five distinct times on the point of getting married, and had five distinct times got, not married, but jilted. It is true that he, each time, took all the blame of the rupture to himself; but his friends did him more justice, and laid the blame where it was due. He would tell you he had behaved shamefully to Julia this, and to Clarinda that, and to Theodosia t'other thing; but you know perfectly well that those ladies, in point of fact, had behaved shamefully to him-that, in one word, he had been the suffering party in the whole transaction. A clinching proof of this was, that the five ladies had married at the appointed time, only they had not married the appointed gentleman. He was still single. Well did Mr. Julius Gullingsworth know this to be the case; he knew in his conscience that he had been ill-used; but he still maintained a cheerful aspect, and would assure you that any pity bestowed on him was totally misplaced that it was 22 in quite a different quarter. It is remarkable that this afterwards turned out to be true-in another sense, perhaps, than Mr. Julius Gullingsworth meant it in. He did not repine; but it was whispered that five other gentlemen didfive gentlemen, each of whom, in succession, Mr. J. G. had inwardly set down for the most fortunate of men, yet who afterwards-such is human caprice-fervently united in regarding him-him, Julius the Jilted, as the luckiest dog alive. The favoured mortal who had supplanted him with his black-haired divinity, said to him, one day that they met in the street, about a year after the marriage—

"You may believe me, Gull, there are worse trees to get from a lady than the willow."

He had made the discovery, if all tales were true, that shillelagh is a vegetable still less calculated to sweeten the cup of life The gentleman that ousted Mr. Julius with her of the golden tresses, is since gone deaf, which is a pity, as he is married to the most eloquent woman in Scotlaud. The fund of metaphysical knowledge that that woman possesses— but we are forgetting our story. Well!

In addition to the natural advantages which we have enumerated above, Mr. Julius Gullingsworth was possessed of a fair amount of acquired ones. He had a great facility in making verses-greater, indeed, than most of his friends had in reading them when they were made. He played on

the pianoforte in a manner which his greatest enemy, had it been possible for any mortal to be his enemy, could not have denied to be middling; he painted in a style that one distinguished at a glance for that of no poor devil of an artist, who did it for bread; and he spoke three or four languages to a certain extent that is, he could say, "Comment vous portez vous," "Come sta?" "Wie befinden sie sich ?" with an accent which, if it would have somewhat obscured his meaning at Paris, Florence, or Dresden, rendered him, what was a great deal more to the purpose, all the more easily understood by ladies and gentlemen who had received their education in Bloomsbury.

Indeed, the subject of accent was one which had already cost Mr. Julius Gullingsworth some thought. Not only did he speak his own particular French with an English accent, but he understood the French of his friends, enunciated in a similar manner, out of all sight better than that spoken by such natives of France as, in his extensive and varied intercourse with society, had now and then come in his way. He considered that a curious fact. He had mentioned it to Captain Dunham Browne, who seemed inclined to resolve it into the effect of the foreign accent; but this explanation appeared to Mr. Julius Gullingsworth to involve the subject in additional obscurity. That the French should speak our language with a foreign accent was conceivable enough—indeed, he did not very well see how it

should be otherwise; but that they should labour under a similar defect in the use of their mother-tongue-that they should speak their own language with a foreign accent, he thought odd.

On the whole, there were few subjects of which Mr. J. G. did not know a little, though we should hesitate to say there was anything of which he knew much; except, perhaps, millinery. There, he was really profound. We have heard it asserted that he knew more about caps, and collars, and insertion, and piping, and gimp, than a great many ladies. He was learned, too, in silks, in lawns, in merinos, in muslins; in everything, in short, pertaining to feminine use or ornament. He was an oracle as to the prices of things, infallible as to the places to get them at, and liked nothing so much as taking ladies out, shopping. Add to all this, that he had a peculiar system of pronunciation, of which the reader has had a specimen in our first chapter; that he was gifted with rather a fine tenor voice, verging on bass, which you were surprised to hear issuing from so very smole a mouth; and that he had worked some of the sweetest things ever seen in Berlin wool.

One other advantage Mr. Julius Gullingsworth rejoiced in, and that, however the terms may seem, in a logical point of view, to contradict one another, was a highly essential, though accidental one. This advan tage was the possession of a comfortable competency, consisting of we do not know the precise number of hundreds, or thousands, of pounds a year. The reader, however, will decide for himself what he would call a comfortable competency for an unmarried but marrying man, and obligingly set down Mr. J. G.'s income at that figure.

Unmitigated prosperity is happily not the lot of any man in this sublunary sphere; and Mr. Julius Gullingsworth had not all these advantages without a

drawback; indeed, he had two. This was not pleasant, but it was salutary; it saved Mr. J. G. from the judgment of a Polycrates, it propitiated Nemesis. The first of these counterpoises, given to prevent his toppling over with the weight of good fortune was, that he was extremely near-sighted, and, as he had a particular dislike to being seen in spectacles, he was apt to mistake people he did not know for people he did, and vice versa, a peculiarity which sometimes brought him into embarrassments of the most trying description. However, this very misfortune had something compensating about it, for it helped to keep him in the blissful belief of his power over the female heart, leading him to take many a look of ennui (for he was an eloquent converser) for a look of tenderness, and often to suppose that a lady sighed when she yawned.

The other black thread in the mingled yarn of Mr. J. G.'s destiny was, that he had come into the world, as the reader already knows, on the first of April. That was worse than the short sight. It was the first misfortune of his life, and one which caused him to cherish, in the most hidden corner of his heart, an unforgiving disposition towards his stars. To be born the first of April! Was it not to be a predestined April fool? Some children are born, we have heard, with a caul, but Mr. Julius Gullingsworth felt that he had been, in a sense, born in a cap and bells. He never could hear congratulations on his birthday, without feeling the bitterness of the irony. To be wished many happy returns of the day! To be felicitated on every return of the Feast of All Fools! It was too much. They might as well have proclaimed him the fool of fools at once, the representative of the order, the model nincompoop.

Mr. Bunks was, after Captain Dunham Browne, Mr. Julius Gullingsworth's most particular friend, and had for some years past, regularly celebrated his (Mr. J. G.'s) birth-day by a ball and supper. Celebrating his birth-day was the way his friends could

best plague him, and, as we have said before, who should take the liberty of using you ill, if your friends could not? However, if there was any description of ill-usage which, more than another, Mr. Julius could submit to with Christian meekness, it was the being invited

ted to a ball. He danced so well! He felt that that was his strong point. Mr. Julius Gullingsworth really danced well: everything else he did was middling, but he danced well. Goodness pity us! what should we be if we did not do something well? But Mr. Julius had a particular reason to look forward with eagerness to this particular ball. He loved, as we have seen, the daughter of Colonel Collatinus Cromwell Hardwood, the beauteous Arborea: he knew that she was to be at Bunks's, and he had resolved on taking this opportunity of declaring his passion. Mr. Julius Gullingsworth, however, was not a gentleman who did things like other gentlemen. Nothing is more common than to make a declaration of love. But there is nothing so common but it may be done in an uncommon way, and Mr. J. G. determined to make his declaration of love in a very uncommon way. He would not make it kneeling, which is, perhaps, the most suitable way, nor sitting, which is out of all sight the most convenient, nor walking, which, where the locality is favourable-the side of the canal, for instance, that you may offer to jump in, in case of a refusal-is a mode also not without its advantages. No! Mr. Julius Gullingsworth would declare himself doing what he did best: he would do it dancing. Now, for any one else to make his declaration of love dancing would be simply bizarre, but for Mr. Julius Gullingsworth so to do it was at once politic and polite: it was showing himself to the best advantage, and it was paying the highest homage to the lady. Had he been a king, he would have offered Arborea his crown: being an incomparable dancer, but unfortunately only a subject, he could but offer her-himself on one leg.

The reader has heard, from Mr. J. G.'s own lips, the plan of operations he had laid down for himself, and seen how lightly he esteemed the breakage of glass and china when weighed against the duty of perfecting himself in this momentous pas. What are such fragilities to a man whose aim is the ideal? The day was at length come, and the reader knows how little appetite it had brought Mr. Julius for his breakfast. The fact is, he had slept ill, a horrid dream had disturbed his rest, and the remembrance of it still

weighed on his spirits. Him seemed he was at Bunks's, and the ball was begun. He was stepping forward to claim Arborea's hand, when he felt as if rooted to the floor. A mirror hung opposite to him, and, casting his eyes upon it, he saw to his horror that, instead of his own slim legs with their fairy terminations, he had got a monstrous pair of elephantine supports, which he at once recognised for the well-flanneled nether humanity of the Rev. Dr. Pondypod, the excellent, but gouty rector of the parish. While he stood lost in wonder and despair at this strange substitution, and unable by the most frantic efforts to put the massive pediments beneath him in motion, Dr. Pondypod himself stepped forward, looking like a stork in a dropsy, his rotund corporation propped upon the dainty pins of our Julius, and led out Arborea to the dance. J. G. protested, but the doctor coolly alleged that it was all right, and reminded the anguish-stricken parishioner that his legs had been distrained in the morning for ministers' money, and that their value being some trifle over the sum due, he (the doctor) had sent him an old pair of his own as small change. Hereupon Dr. P. floated away with Arborea, as lightly as a bird of paradise, upon our hero's "fantastic toe." Mr. Julius's distress became so lively that he awoke in a cold sweat.

Mr.

As he thought over this dream in the morning, he felt convinced that it boded him no good, and misfortune after misfortune came to justify his apprehensions. First, his lips were scalded so cruelly, that not only did his mouth look quite unlike itself, but every attempt to produce a smile occasioned him the most exquisite torment. Next, the cramp he had got by standing so unusually long on his right leg, kept returning, at brief intervals, all day, and inspired him with the profoundest uneasiness, lest it should lay its dire grasp on him in the critical moment, when he most needed a perfect command over his limbs and his features. And thirdly, the effects of the bump Captain Dunham Browne had given him against the floor let themselves be felt for hours, and left some tinglings of pain in the parts more immediately engaged, which had not wholly ceased when the hour of

dressing for Bunks's arrived. And now calamity followed on the heels of calamity; Mr. Julius's silk stockings gave way at the instep as he drew them on; then two buttons of his waistcoat came off; then he scorched his cravat, in inspecting the tie in the glass, by the light of the candle: in springing into the carriage he dropped his white gloves in the gutter; he called for a fresh pair, and was nearly half way to Bunks's, when he discovered that his blundering valet had given him two lefts! He had to turn back, of course, and it was just an hour later than he had intended it should be, when he entered the ball-room.

He soon found out Arborea, whose dress of white and cherry colour, with a wreath of white and red roses in her hair, rendered her a conspicuous object in the crowd-an important point for a gentleman so near-sighted as Mr. Julius Gullingsworth. He accosted her. Never had she looked more beautiful: her eyes sparkled, her cheeks glowed, there was a radiance about her that seemed to indicate some strong inward emotion, and Mr. Julius felt no doubt that she had foreboded his intention of declaring his sentiments that evening. He asked her for the dance that was just going to begin: she was engaged for that dance by Captain Dunham Browne. He asked her for the next dance, and received a promise. On the whole, he was not sorry to sit still for a while after the agitations of the last hour: he really stood in need of rest.

- No sooner was Arborea again seated, than Mr. J. G. joined her. It was his turn now dancing recommenced, and he was in paradise. But Adam was once in paradise, too, and fell. Mr. Julius Gullingsworth's paradise also was no estate of long continuance. The difference was, that his fall was a foregone one. In other words, he began to feel the consequences of his bump; the pain, which had for the greatest part of the day rendered it easier to him to stand than either to sit or go, came back.

Mr. Julius Gullingsworth was, under circumstances like the present, capable of efforts not undeserving to be called heroic. Cold drops stood on his brow; but, by dint of resolution almost superhuman, his features betrayed nothing of the anguish he en

dured, and which grew more intense

every moment.

"I think we're going to sleep," said Arborea.

"Come, fiddlers," cried Captain Dunham Browne,, " stir your elbows! Lively !"

The "fiddlers" obeyed the music became more animated-the movement of the dance more rapid. Mr. Julius Gullingsworth taxed the powers of his soul, and mustered fortitude enough to smile amid torments to which the rack were an easy chair. Yet Arborea ceased not to ask"Why so little yourself this evening, Mr. Gullingsworth? You are not at all the dancer you were."

Can the reader doubt if words like these were pricks of red hot needles in Mr. J. G's. heart? Not the dancer he was! Heavens!-if he was not a dancer, what was he? To fall off in his dancing he felt to be a moral annihilation.

All this, however, was but a prelude to the heavier blow fate had yet in store for him. The country-dance, which had given our unhappy hero (for we think he has fairly established his claim to the title) a foretaste of the sensations of a place we forbear to name, was over. Mr. Julius Gullingsworth had handed Miss Hardwood to a seat, and retired to a quiet corner, where he could give relaxation to his overtaxed powers, and nurse his anguish unremarked. Dance followed dance: he saw Arborea waltz with Captain Dunham Browne, and polkify with Bunks, and could not even muster energy to be jealous. He might have sat thus, gloomily reflecting on things in general, a matter of some forty-five minutes, when an attendant, carrying a long-necked bottle, approached him, followed by another who bore glasses on a tray.

"Champagne sir ?" said the first attendant.

Mr. Julius Gullingsworth looked at him sorrowfully, and, stretching out his hand with a resigned expression, took a glass from the tray. To his

dark spirit, in that moment, all things were alike. Champagne or prussicacid-what difference did it make to a man who was morally annihilated?

A cork bounced-a sound was heard, like the hissing of surf on a sandy beach: it was the champagne in