And till I find such a one I endeavour, when I see a fine face, or a graceful form, to regard them merely as beautiful pictures, or fascinating automatons. But as women from among whom I am to select a wife, oh condemn me to perpetual celibacy: aye, faith, to a halter, rather than to a beautiful woman with a treacherous heart. It is like enshrining a venomous toad in a casket of alabaster, which renders the foul blotches of the noxious inhabitant the more conspicuous. So vice in a beauteous form is doubly hateful; it debases Heaven's fairest work. It is an enhancement of guilt to misapply those graces which were designed to be the embellishments of virtue; and render vice conspicuously eminent by affording it an asylum where innocence and purity alone should dwell.' I looked stedfastly at miss Lester while I was speaking. Her complexion varied several times; but, before I concluded, she rallied her spirits, and assuming a look, and tone of sorrow, exclaimed I am grieved, inexpressibly grieved, that government has abofished the corresponding society. Ah! if it had not,-under the auspices of some rhetorical citizen you would have made a very pretty orator. O Baderly; I would give a thousand pounds to see you mounted on an empty beer barrel, haranguing with all the fire of fancy-thundering out the tropes and figures of rhetoric; now pathetically lamenting the oppression of power in well-turned periods; and then denounc ng anathemas against all opponents: then again endeavouring to beat your reasons into the stubborn, obstinate, stupid heads of your ragged auditory; who, no doubt, would attribute more wisdom to you than to the whole aristocracy. Really it would make a charming caricature; and some leisure morning I may throw it on paper.' "I think,' said Mrs. Howard, (with more seriousness than usual) what Mr. Baderly has observed, on the particular deformity of vice, when cherished in a beautiful bosom, by no means deserved such a reply as it met with. Vice in any shape to be hated needs but to be seen.' Yet when we see a face of expressive innocence, a bosom of snow, and the graces playing in every movement of the elegant form, we feel loth to suppose it possible that such a lovely structure should be polluted by guilt, or that the bewitching, specious appearance, should cover the vile machinations of an envious, ungrateful heart. That such characters are not drawn by the pencil or Fancy we all know: would to heaven they were. True,' interrupted Walsingham; but as in this charming circle none but the good, the fair, are assembled, why should we intrude such heterogeneous characters even in imagination? Your soul, my dear miss Lester, is harmony; take a generous revenge on the renegado Baderly, by melting his obdurate bosom with your divine voice.' : I found was impossible with apathy. I considered her as a snake a siren, who lured but to betray and when she should bestow her person, all charming as it is, on the man of her choice, she would bring him more plagues than ever Pandora's box was said to contain. Thus thinking, I was inwardly vexed at my gazing so long at her; and turned away my eyes with disgust. Heavens ! what a contrast did they light on! Lady Walsingham had stole into the room unperceived. She was dressed in a clear sprigged muslin robe, trimmed with lilac; a Grecian headdress, with pearl bandeaus, necklace, and bracelets. She looked the goddess of simplicity-the queen of beauty. A glance from her mild expressive eye calmed my agitated spirits. I found I could now look at Lester. Her piercing black eyes were fixed on me. I felt rather disconcerted; being conscious that the pleasure which the presence of lady Walsingham afforded me was conspicuous in my countenance. And yet I could not. look off her. The chaste, modest smile, which irradiated her features, led me to think it was from such a countenance that Milton drew his Eve. And I am persuaded if he had not Well, my lord, yours seem amazingly enlightened ! And though my eyes are not blinded, yet they are absolutely dazzled — not by your incomparable divinity, but your incomparable wife !' Ah, Charles ! she is an excellent woman!-Would to Heaven she were yours! She would make you completely happy. You have had your run among the sex; and when you marry you will commence a quiet Benedict. Now I, as you know, saw lady Caroline Aubry when I was very young.To see her was to love her! You was then in Ireland, but you, no doubt, remember the hopes and fears you were pestered with in iny letters. My father was dead-I was without encumbrance. My sister Julia's fortune was large, and entirely independent of me. I made proposals-was accepted— and suffered myself to be bound in the chains of Hymen. I will confess to you, I thought them at that time golden chains, and fastened only by the blushing rose, and ever-blooming myrtle-and it is but lately that I have found the flowers withered, the gold worn off, and nothing to be seen but the durable iron.' I was going to speak, but he prevented me.- I know what you would say, Baderly, but it won't do-while such a captivating girl as this bewitching Lester does me the honour to accept my assiduities, I must, and will, hope. Your cautions, my dear fellow, I know, are well meant; but if after this evening you renew them I shall inpute it to envy at my good fortune. Caroline is an amiable girl, and if her winning beauty is insufficient to secure her my heart, your known good sense will inform you that any other mediation will but widen the breach it was meant to close.' I was silent. I saw that he was determined to pursue his own ruin, and wound the heart of his charming wife. When we came in sight of the park he caught my hand :- Baderly,' said he, be not offended with me-I would to God I could give this affair up as easily as you seem to think I might; but I cannot:-Think as well as you can of me. This is the only point on which we can disagree. Our friendship is of long standing-let not a woman divide us.-You are not in love with Helen yourself?' I assured him I was not: That his honour, and the happiness of lady Walsingham, were my dearest concerns. He shook me by the hand- My dear fellow, I believe you; but this is an affair I could wish even the eye of friendship to wink at. I am in the road to happiness, or at least lost in pleasing delusion, and charmingly deceived!' And so this affair, Legoxton, must rest as it is; time only can dark night, under Russian colours, as a sign of peace. When floating high in the air, above the multitude of admiring spectators, a flight of sky-rockets were discharged at him, which, he says, broke into sparks, hardly rising to his vision from the earth; and Paris, with all its blaze of reflecting lamps, appeared to him but like a spot-like the Pleiades, for instance, to the naked eye. He gained an elevation, he says, of 3000 toises, and speaks with enthusiasm of his seeing the sun rise at that height. After a flight of seven hours and a half, he descended near Rheims, 45 leagues from Paris. Of his second aerial ascensionby night, which proved so perilous, M. GARNERIN has published the following account :-- My second aerial journey by night will not afford an opportunity for the brilliant narratives which I have had occasion to make in the course of my forty preceding ascensions. I shall not have to describe the majestic appear ances which nature continually of fers to the eyes of an aeronaut who ascends in favourable weather. I can only give a narrative of an aerial tempest which was nigh terminating in shipwreck. The obstacles which the wind caused to the inflation of the balloon sufficiently apprized me of the approach of the storm; and to the difficulties of the weather was added the turbulence of a party, by which I was prevented from placing the cord of the valve, so as to regulate the tube, which, in case of expansion, was to conduct the gas into a direction different VOL. XXXVIII. from the lights which surrounded the bottom of the balloon. I was to have been accompanied by M. De Chassenton; but the aerial storm, which continually increased until the moment of my departure, gave me reason to apprehend such a disaster as Mr. Blanchard, and another aeronaut, met with in Holland. M. De Chassenton was actually in the boat. I must bear witness to his determination; for I am convinced' that nothing could have made this young man, remarkable for his merit, quit the boat, if the wellgrounded apprehension which I entertained, of seeing him exposed to certain destruction, had not suggested to me the idea of declaring to him, that the balloon was not capable of carrying up two persons. It was thus, in the most adverse weather, and exposed to the greatest opposition and the tumult of a cabal, the head of which it is easy to guess at, that I ascended from Tivoli, at half past ten o'clock on the night of the 21st September. An unexampled rapidity of ascension, but extremely necessary to prevent ine from coming in contact with the adjoining houses, raised me above the clouds, and in a few minutes carried me to an immense height, the extent of which I cannot precisely ascertain, on account of the dangers and embarrassments which suddenly affected my imagination, and prevented me from observing the declension of the mercury in the barometer.. Elevated in an instant to the frozen regions, the balloon became subject to a degree of expansion which inspired me with the greatest apprehension. There was no alternative between certain death and giving instant vent to 4 I the gas; and this at the risk of seeing the balloon take fire. I gradually opened with one hand an orifice of about two feet diameter, by which the gas escaped in large volumes, while, with the other, I extinguished as many of the lights as I could. During this effort I several times was near overbalancing myself, and falling out of the boat. Deprived of the opportunity of regulating the valve, my balloon, like a ship without a rudder, floated in the air, obeying the influence of the temperature, the winds, and the rain. Whenever the force of these made me descend, the storm, which kept still increasing, obliged me to throw out ballast, for the purpose of avoiding it, and escaping from imminent shipwreck. At length, at four o'clock in the morning, after having been almost continually enveloped in thick clouds, through which I could seldom see the moon, all the means of supporting myself in the air were exhausted. Whatever skill I possessed was no longer of use to me. My boat several times struck against the ground and rebounded thence. The tempest often drove me against the sides and tops of mountains. Whenever my anchor caught in a tree, the balloon was so violently agitated by the wind, that I experienced all the inconvenience of a violent sea-sickness. Plunged at one time to the bottom of a precipice, in another instant after I ascended, and acquired a new elevation. The violence of the concussions exhausted my strength, and I lay for half an hour in the boat in a state of insensibility. During this tempest I recovered; I perceived Mont Tonnerre, and it was in the midst of crashes of thunder, and at a moment which I supposed would be my last, that [ planted upon this celebrated moun tain the Eagle of Napoleon joined to that of Alexander. I was carried away for some time longer by gusts of wind, but fortunately some peasants came to my assistance at the moment that the anchor hooked in a tree. They took hold of the cords which hung from the balloon, and landed me in a forest upon the side of a mountain, at half-past five in the morning, seven hours and a half after my departure, and more than 100 leagues distant from Paris. They took me to Clausen, in the canton of Waldfischbach, and department. of Mont Tonnerre. M. Cesar, a man of information, and Mayor of the neighbouring town, came and offered me every assistance in his power, and at my request drew up a narrative, of which he gave me a copy. I was splendidly entertained the next day at Deux Ponts by a society of friends of the arts, consisting of public functionaries, the officers of the 12th regiment of Cuirassiers, and the members of the lodge of freemasons. "GARNERIN. To the EDITOR of the LADY'S MAGAZINE. SIR, THERE can be no doubt but that you will readily allow me the opportunity of saying a few words in reply to the letter of Mr. W. M.T. inserted in your last number. As the gentleman has given himself the trouble (which, by the bye, he remarks they scarcely deserve) to criticise those motly and ridiculous effusions' intituled, |