a scene that is between her and her husband, where she attempts to make him forget his vengeance by filling his mind with the first fascination of her beauty, which, to be turned upon him for a moment, was such sweet flattery. I like Gennaro's love for his unknown parent. The deepest feelings of the human heart are those given to the unattainable and the mysterious. Love for the known and the possessed takes the more endurable (is it not so?) but less poetical form of affection. The denouement is dreadful. So true! for it is curious to note how constantly vice is punished through some last touch of lingering goodness. Thus
'Soon or late it is its own avenger.'
Some kindly feeling, some dearest sympathy, that would have been happiness to the innocent, becomes torture in its worst shape to the guilty."
From a few of the many notes addressed, almost daily, to various friends about this period, some passages may be taken as exact specimens of the free and careless manner in which L. E. L. invariably wrote to her intimate acquaintances. If, in this respect, their literary interest should appear too slight, let it be observed that they afford the reader some insight into her daily feelings and associations at an important stage of her career, and lead to the gratifying conviction that the prevalent tone of her spirits, notwithstanding all she had undergone, was far less weary and depressed than those who judged her by her writings were accustomed to suppose. And it may be as well to remark that L. E. L., in her epistolary habits, reversed the maxim by which long letters are excused on the score of a want of time to write short ones; she rarely wrote into a second sheet,
