e d'honneur_ to the Queen, she had left off
_red_ (wearing rouge,) and acted _devotion_; and the very next day was
seen riding with Madame de Pompadour (the King's mistress) in the
latter's coach!" The editor settles the question of _her_ morality,
too.--"She was a woman of extraordinary wit and cleverness, but
totally _without character_." She had her morals by inheritance; for
she was the daughter of the _mistress_ of the Duke of Lorraine, who
married her to Monsieur de Beauvan, a poor noble, and whom the duke
got made a prince of the empire, by the title of De Craon. Now, all
those were females of the highest rank in France, ladies of fashion,
the stars of court life, and the models of national manners. Can we
wonder at the retribution which cast them out into the highways of
Europe? Can we wonder at the ruin of the corrupted nobility? Can we
wonder at the massacre of the worldly church, which stood looking on
at those vilenesses, and yet never uttered a syllable against them, if
it did not even share in their excesses? The true cause for
astonishment is, not in the depth of their fall, but in its delay; not
in the severity of the national judgment, but in that long-suffering
which held back the thunderbolt for a hundred years, and even then did
not extinguish the generation at a blow!

[Footnote 33: _Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, by
Horace Walpole. From the MSS. Edited, with Notes, by_ SIR D. LA
MARCHANT, BART. London: Bentley.]

A FEW PASSAGES CONCERNING OMENS, DREAMS, APPEARANCES, &c.

IN A LETTER TO EUSEBIUS.

No. II.

It is somewhat late, my dear, Eusebius, to refer me to my letter of
August 1840, and to enquire, in your bantering way, if I have shaken
hands with a ghost recently, or dreamed a dream worth telling. You
have evidently been thinking upon this subject ever since I wrote to
you; and I suspect you are more of a convert than you will admit. You
only wish to provoke me to further evidence; but I see--through the
flimsy veil of your seeming denials, and through your put-on
audacity--the nervous workings of your countenance, when your
imagination is kindled by the mysterious subject. Your wit and your
banter are but the whistle of the clown in the dark, to keep down his
rising fears. However good your story[34] may be, there have been
dreams even of the numbers of lottery-tickets that have been verified.
We call things coincidences and chances, because we have no name to
gi