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ROMANCE AND REALITY.

ration of that spirit of romantic enterprise so much wanting in young men of the present day, has asked me to her fancy ball, and held forth the temptation of the beauties of her room on the strength of my traversing 'river wild and forest old.' Mrs. Harcourt takes an intellectual degree beyond the common collector of crowds—she desires that every second individual in hers should be 'noticeable persons;' her young ladies are beauties or heiresses; her gentlemen geniuses, authors, or travellers. I have been at her house, though she has forgotten me. I was then only a young man—not 'the young man who spent the summer in the Pyrenees, and had brought home the guitar of a Spanish princess.' I saw Sir Hudson Lowe standing on the same rug with one of Buonaparte's old generals; one of our Tory members, to whom innovation is the 'word of fear,' who considers anarchy and annihilation as synonymous, shrinking in the doorway from the carbonari atmosphere of General Pepi. I saw a most orthodox-looking bishop taking the paleness of horror from the sight of Mr. Owen. A man just come from Babylon was talking to one newly arrived from Moscow. There were two critics, one historian, half-a-dozen