in which there were two Harlequins, father and son. Harlequin senior, grown old and gouty, had retired from public life, and the scene in which we were introduced to his family circle was quite a bit of comedy, enabling us for the first time, to meet that celebrated character in his quiet domestic moments. There was the old gentleman, very fat and unwieldy, with his once swift legs swathed in flannel, and rolled up and down the stage in an arm-chair, exhibiting a sensitive horror of all the racketting noises and perilous motions in which he used to take such delight in his younger days. His wife, who had, no doubt, been the airiest of Columbines in her youth, was now a care-worn old woman, bent in the back with a hacking cough, and hobbling about by the help of a stick, surrounded by a brood of the most mischievous incipient harlequins, clowns and columbines that the imagination could conjure up. This scene, which did not last half long enough for the pleasure (of rather a sad cast) which it gave us, was an absolute touch of genius. The ambition of the eldest son and heir was, of course, to rival the early glories of his sire, who, with the obstructive gravity of most people that have outlived their first gay impulses, was anxious to bring up his son to a more respectable profession than his own; but the son was bent upon being a harlequin in spite of him, and the felonious ingenuity he displayed in stealing the magic lath, by which he was to acquire the power of working the subsequent wonders of the pantomime, bore a strangely comical resemblance to Prince Hal's theft of his father's crown. The grotesque trickery by which he accomplished his design upon abdicated majesty, acquired something of an actually serious interest from the parallel it suggested.

Then we recollect another pantomime at Covent Garden, with a grand classical prelude, which had stuff enough in it to furnish some capital jokes for poor Power. One passage in it is now as vividly before us as if we saw it only last night, although some twenty years, or thereabouts, have elapsed since it gave us a memorable pain in our critical sides. Polyphemus was turned into an Irish giant, who had an ugly appetite for eating children, and we shall never forget with what inimitable courage and high-mettled vivacity Power knocked his eye out with a shillelah, and fished down his throat for an infant he had just swallowed, which he drew up as if it were a trout. Intermixed with the story of Polyphemus, in an admirable chaos of a plot, was the holy legend of St. Patrick (which we throw out as a valuable hint at the present moment, for we anticipate that the pope and the saints will divide the satirical fun of the forthcoming pantomimes with the Glass Palace); and there was such driving out of snakes and noxious reptiles as made the lieges roar with delight, although we are not quite sure that the other items of the ballad-such as the charming of "three hundred thousand vipers blue," and serving them up in Killaloe Castle "in soups and second courses were included in the poet's design.

But we must here bring our gossip to an end, or we should run on out of all reasonable bounds-and so commending everybody to the Pantomimes, as the genuine surviving masks of the season, and hoping that they will realize all the humour, and gaiety, and pointed sarcasm we have a right to expect from them, we cannot conclude better than by wishing to everybody

A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

THE OATH.

"There is some soul of goodness in things evil
Would men observingly distil it out;

Thus we may gather honey from the weed,
And make a moral of the devil himself."

King Henry V.

FLORENCE AND GERALDINE STANMER were the only daughters of an Irish gentleman, of ancient family and extensive property, in one of the most picturesque parts of the "sacred isle." Having experienced the misfortune to lose their mother at an early age, they were by their father gladly entrusted to the care of a distant relation, well-known in what were then the best circles of London society; and who, having married her own daughters advantageously, and requiring, as she expressed it, some stimulus to induce her to go out, readily undertook the charge of girls so eminently attractive as were the Miss Stanmers. She prognosticated that they must indubitably make great matches; and, so far as the eldest was concerned, her prophecy proved singularly felicitous; for Florence, at the expiration of her first London season, became the wife of the Duke of. But Geraldine, after refusing several most eligible offers, and remaining single three years subsequent to her sister's brilliant alliance, eventually married Henry Buchan, a young clergyman, who, when she first became acquainted with him, filled the post of domestic chaplain to the duke her brother-in-law. For more than two years these young people had vainly striven, each for the other's sake, to overcome their mutual attachment; and when at length they resolved to marry, it was with the certain conviction that, on their wedding-day, all Henry Buchan's hopes of worldly advancement would be finally crushed. The most pre-eminently virulent among Geraldine's family, at what they were pleased undeservedly to term her mésalliance, was the Duchess her sister; who having by this time expended her originally somewhat limited stock of youthful ingenuousness, had become a very decided specimen of the ambitious woman of her class. From the morning of Geraldine's marriage the sisters never met again; and, as resentments augment by being cherished, to such a pitch did the Duchess's wrath against her eventually amount, that she seemed to take a malignant satisfaction in circumventing every endeavour on the part of Henry Buchan to obtain the smallest preferment. Few could have been found more worthy than he to possess both rank and wealth in the Church; nevertheless, he continued, until the day of his death, a poor curate, a patient, conscientious, overworked, and underpaid country

curate.

But Geraldine had loved wisely no less than well; so that, despite the estrangement from her family, which she never ceased secretly to deplore, and despite, likewise, many privations, and a few real trials, she, whom one of the poets of her day had declared “seemed born to tread only on flowers," might with truth be pronounced as

happy in her lowly and indigent home, as it is good for the Immortal to feel amidst the fleeting shadows of Mortality.

After a union of twenty years, the Buchans died within a very short period of each other, having fallen victims to a malignant fever then raging among the cottagers in their neighbourhood. They left an only child, Florence (for thus was she named in memory of her mother's estranged but still beloved sister), who, at the age of eighteen, found herself an isolated orphan, with a fortune of five hundred pounds. The lord of the manor, in whose village Mr. Buchan had officiated as curate, having accidentally, and to his great surprise, ascertained Florence's relationship to the Duchess of

with whom he was slightly acquainted, wrote to her in such glowing terms of Miss Buchan's beauty and amiable qualities, touching, at the same time, so pathetically on the misery and probable peril that awaited her in her present forlorn position, that the Duchess, who had no daughters, and whose conscience began to smite her for her harsh conduct to her sister, now that the latter was irretrievably lost, thought it just possible that she might like this reported paragon of a niece to live with her. She likewise soothed herself with the idea that her adoption of Florence would be an ample atonement for the past. Accordingly, a carriage, money, and attendants were dispatched from Sandford Castle for Miss Buchan, to enable her to arrive at that princely residence in a manner befitting her close connexion with its owner. It is more than probable that, had Florence Buchan known the real cause of the Duchess's estrangement from her beloved mother, she would not so willingly have accepted her proffered protection; but as it was, overwhelmed with grief, poverty, and solitude, the bereaved girl eagerly and gratefully obeyed her aunt's summons.

The Duke and Duchess were not disappointed in the expectations they had been induced to form of Florence's appearance and manners indeed, it would have been quite impossible for the most grossly prejudiced person not to have admired this beautiful and elegant girl at first sight. With respect to her disposition it must be admitted that Nature had endowed her with something more of her aunt's than her mother's character. But her too plentiful share of pride and ambition had been checked and subdued by her father, in the course of a most judiciously careful education. Together with one of the most distinguished men this age has beheld, Mr. Buchan conceived it to be an indisputable maxim, "that the character of a whole race may be formed in the mould cast by the superior education of an individual;" and, under his wise control, Florence gradually obtained a quiet and contented tone of mind, founded upon that only true independence, unswerving principle. Her father's well-remembered lessons stood her in good stead in her new position, preventing her from being dazzled by the delusive glare into which she was so suddenly precipitated.

Florence's eldest cousin, the Marquis of Mount Sandford, had married on attaining his majority the daughter of the then Premier, and resided with his wife at one of the family seats in Scotland. His brother, Lord Edwin, was destined by their mother, at the close of the Peninsular war, in which his regiment was engaged, to become the husband of a Miss Elliotson, the heiress to vast possessions both in money and lands. The young soldier, when little more

than a boy, had made, with equal rapidity and absence of design, a most tender impression upon Miss Elliotson's facile feelings, which the Duchess, keenly practised in observation, was not slow in discovering and striving to turn to account. When Lord Edwin perceived that his mother was playing the agreeable for him, he merely laughed, and loungingly observed, that "it would never do, for the young lady's ankles were too thick."

It must be confessed that he had not a very exalted opinion of woman. How should he? Men are first taught by their mothers; and the Duchess's "canker-worms of boasted reason" were already preying upon her son's heart and understanding. He was beginning to regard the sex as divided into two classes playthings and schemers-fools or devils, as he himself would have described

them.

While Florence was still in deep mourning for her parents, and endeavouring strenuously to obtain that most difficult of all virtues, resignation, Lord Edwin, who had been severely wounded during the last campaign, returned to England, and to Sandford Castle, for the recovery of his health. Nor was it long before Miss Elliotson arrived there also, specially invited by the Duchess, who had a real liking for the girl, independently of her interested projects. Not that Lucy Elliotson possessed any striking qualities; she was simply good-humoured, and disposed to be goodnatured, provided that the being so did not entail upon her much trouble. But then she acquiesced in everything the Duchess said or did, which gratified the latter, who loved power for its own sake, and who had been hitherto accustomed to sway every one around her, from the Duke downwards. Although too proud to admit it even to herself, she, nevertheless, not unfrequently felt frustrated, when promulgating her intensely worldly maxims, by the independent yet perfectly respectful tone of her niece's "I cannot agree with you." Lord Edwin, on his arrival, at once assumed towards his cousin the easy familiarity of a relation. "We must consider the first part played, as my old dancing-master used to enjoin upon us at school, when in a hurry, and begin to be great friends immediately, without losing any more precious time in preliminaries.” The unconstrained freedom of such intercourse was that best calculated to display Florence to the utmost advantage; who, conversing naturally and unsuspiciously, revealed by degrees the rich stores of a generous and cultivated nature to a man who now began, for the first time, to think reverently of woman. In Lord Edwin's society Florence felt happier than she had previously done for months; but it was not until she heard the Duchess one day pointedly allude to Miss Elliotson as her future daughter-in-law, that she awoke to the conviction how absolutely necessary to her felicity, her gay, gallant, and versatile cousin had become. Bewildered with shame and fear, she longed to escape somewhere, she knew not where, for safety and freedom. She fancied that every one was in possession of her secret, and she grew, notwithstanding her utmost endeavours to the contrary, painfully abashed and constrained in her demeanour. Perhaps it was the alteration in her manner towards him that first taught Lord Edwin how deeply he loved Florence; or it might have been the attentions that other men were eagerly bestowing on her, that roused his jealous feelings, and determined him to appropriate her imme

diately to himself. He had been from his birth a very child of impulse.

"But I thought that you liked Miss Elliotson." This remark was very timidly hazarded by Florence, in reply to a passionate declaration of attachment which had just been poured into her ear by Lord Edwin. She did not quite approve of the mawkish expression "liked," and yet, somehow or another, her tongue refused to give utterance to a stronger word.

"And so I do like her very well, and, of course, as my mother's visitor, pay her certain attentions; but I love you, dearest-ay, better than words can express. I never loved before. Look at me, my own Florence; and let me read my fate written in those beautiful eyes."

And Florence vouchsafed him one furtive glance; then steadfastly lifting her gaze to the clear bright sky above them, she murmured an emphatic "Thank God!" seemingly unconscious that she did so audibly. So lovely was she at that moment in her fervent purity, that Lord Edwin felt life passed without her would be valueless to him.

"Swear to me, Florence," he impetuously exclaimed, “ that you will never marry another!" and, as she hesitated to obey him. shrinking in some alarm at his excited manner, he renewed his demand more peremptorily than before.

"There is no need, Edwin, for it is not in my nature to waver or change; yet, if it makes you happy, I swear to be yours, and yours alone!"

"I swear likewise an eternal fidelity to you, Florence Buchan, and may Heaven deprive of reason the one who first violates this oath !"

Florence involuntarily cowered as she heard these dreadful words, hiding her face in her hands; but the rash utterer of them stood erect and daring in his impiety.

"Now I feel secure of my prize," he muttered, after a minute's pause; but he was startled from his triumphant reflections by seeing his companion sink in a swoon at his feet.

'Gad, Lady Edwin is going it in that box up there with Trevanian!"

"Yes! indeed," lisped a female voice, " every one is talking about it. I expect to hear of an explosion in that quarter shortly!" and the lady lowered her glass with a slight titter.

How should woman tell

"Ah!

Of woman's shame, and not with tears?"

"For my part," resumed the first speaker, "I think her husband would be deuced glad to get rid of her."

At this moment the curtain of the stage drew up, and every voice was hushed, and every head stretched forward, as the great singer, whose début in London that night had made so extraordinary a sensation, advanced towards the footlights to resume her role. Despite her Italian name, it was whispered that she was of English origin; but this notion her most vehement admirers repudiated with scorn