my cheek, or resting its little
snowy-dimpled hand on mine. I like to fancy the fairy foot, round and
pulpy, but small to diminutiveness, peeping from beneath the drapery
that half conceals it, or moving in the mazes of the dance. I detest
thin women; and unfortunately all, or nearly all plump women, have
clumsy hands and feet, so that I am obliged to have recourse to
imagination for my beauties, and there I always find them. I can so
well understand the lover leaving his mistress that he might write to
her, I should leave mine, not to write to, but to think of her, to
dress her up in the habiliments of my ideal beauty, investing her with
all the charms of the latter, and then adoring the idol I had formed.
You must have observed that I give my heroines extreme refinement,
joined to great simplicity and want of education. Now, refinement and
want of education are incompatible, at least I have ever found them
so: so here again, you see, I am forced to have recourse to
imagination, and certainly it furnishes me with creatures as unlike
the sophisticated beings of civilized existence, as they are to the
still less tempting, coarse realities of vulgar life. In short, I am
of opinion that poets do not require great beauty in the objects of
their affection; all that is necessary for them is a strong and
devoted attachment from the object, and where this exists, joined to
health and good temper, little more is required, at least in early
youth, though with advancing years, men become more _exigeants_."
Talking of the difference between love in early youth and in maturity,
Byron said, "that, like the measles, love was most dangerous when it
came late in life."

_New Monthly Magazine._

* * * * *

UMBRELLAS.

_By one of the year 1750._

Umbrellas, in my youth, were not ordinary things; few but the
macaronis of the day, as the dandies were then called, would venture
to display them. For a long while it was not usual for men to carry
them without incurring the brand of effeminacy, and they were vulgarly
considered as the characteristics of a person whom the mob hugely
disliked, namely, a mincing Frenchman! At first, a single umbrella
seems to have been kept at a coffee-house for some extraordinary
occasion--lent as a coach or chair in a heavy shower--but not commonly
carried by the walkers. The Female Tatler advertises, "the young
gentleman belonging to the custom-house who, in fear of rai