account of the sensation that such poems excited. He and his fellow-students exhausted their ingenuity in romantic speculations concerning the unknown singer, and inscribed whole reams of fervid but indifferent stanzas to her honor. "There was always," he says, "in the reading-room of the Union, a rush every Saturday afternoon for the Literary Gazette, and an impatient anxiety to hasten at once to that corner of the sheet which contained the three magical letters L. E. L. All of us praised the verse, and all of us guessed the author. We soon learned that it was a female, and our admiration was doubled, and our conjectures tripled." When Francesca Carrara appeared, it was received with an enthusiasm never manifested for Pride and Prejudice, or Persuasion, and romantic young men and women reveled in its impassioned melancholy. What a pattering of tear-drops on every page! The lovely heroine—less mindful of her clothes than Mrs. Pullet—looks down and marks how the great drops have fallen like rain upon her bosom. "Alas!" she sighs, "I have cause to weep. I must weep over my own changefulness, and over the
