her
love-correspondence with Ossoli was the only relic--the last memorial
of that howling hurricane, pitiless sea, wreck on a sand-bar, an idle
life-boat, beach-pirates, and not one friend!

With the exception of certain sections of laboured, writhing
wordiness, the feverish restlessness and hectic symptoms of which are
but too familiar to persons read in the literature of second-rate
transcendentalism, these volumes comprise a large amount of matter
that will well repay perusal, and portray a character of no ordinary
type--a 'large-brained woman and large-hearted man.'

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 3 vols. London: Bentley. 1852.

[2] Mr Fuller's Autobiography, which comprises the first sixty pages
of these Memoirs.

THE COUNTER-STROKE.

Just after breakfast one fine spring morning in 1837, an advertisement
in the _Times_ for a curate caught and fixed my attention. The salary
was sufficiently remunerative for a bachelor, and the parish, as I
personally knew, one of the most pleasantly situated in all
Somersetshire. Having said that, the reader will readily understand
that it could not have been a hundred miles from Taunton. I instantly
wrote, enclosing testimonials, with which the Rev. Mr Townley, the
rector, was so entirely satisfied, that the return-post brought me a
positive engagement, unclogged with the slightest objection to one or
two subsidiary items I had stipulated for, and accompanied by an
invitation to make the rectory my home till I could conveniently suit
myself elsewhere. This was both kind and handsome; and the next day
but one I took coach, with a light heart, for my new destination. It
thus happened that I became acquainted, and in some degree mixed up,
with the train of events it is my present purpose to relate.

The rector I found to be a stout, portly gentleman, whose years
already reached to between sixty and seventy. So many winters,
although they had plentifully besprinkled his hair with gray, shone
out with ruddy brightness in his still handsome face, and keen,
kindly, bright-hazel eyes; and his voice, hearty and ringing, had not
as yet one quaver of age in it. I met him at breakfast on the morning
after my arrival, and his reception of me was most friendly. We had
spoken together but for a few minutes, when one of the French windows,
that led from the breakfast-room into a shrubbery and flower-garden,
gently opened and admitted a lady, just then, as I aft