have a pleasure in speaking—an author, yet free from envy—a critic, yet free from malice. Charles Townsend said of old, 'to tax and to please, any more than to love and be wise, is not given to man;' and to prefer and yet please, is a difficult task for an editor. Perhaps it is because liberal and kindly feelings are to be found in the object of your inquiry. It is a pleasant thing to enter his house. It is as well to see domestic happiness now and then, in order to be able to talk about it as a wonder. Congenial in tastes, united in pursuits, he is fortunate in a wife, who is pretty enough to be silly, and yet clever enough to be plain, and kind and good enough to be either."
At this moment, a lady came up and spoke to Mrs. Sullivan, with that warm kindliness of manner, which, like love, air, or sunshine, must win its way everywhere.
"That is the very person we were speaking of, and the most charming and fittest of writers for youth,—at least to them have her last works been chiefly addressed; but the oldest might go back to the chronicles of her school-room for the mere pleasure of being young again. It is quite wonderful to me, in such a cross-grained, hardening, and harsh world as ours, where she
