are ill-flavoured, sour, and harsh: from such samples estimates should never be made; nature properly brought up and polished, takes a different cast; the clay in one and the other hardly seems to be the same.

Hence, Madam, I have often wondered among people so polite and gallant as the French, what could have given rise or continuance to the Salic Law; originally Gallic it could not be, but of Gothic mode, transplanted from the northern parts of Germany, by Franks and Lombards: but why, after such repeated experience of its bad effects, they are so impolitic, I must say, so perverse; as still to adhere to it, I cannot account.

To bar females the succession, where they always preside in council, is oddly inconsistent; the example of what happened among us, the flourishing state of our monarchy under female government, might have taught them to correct this ridiculous mistake. Let any one but reflect what we were in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, what in the reign of Queen Anne, what in the reign of a Margaret of Anjou, what we might have been

had she not wanted the incumbrance of a priveling husband, and they will find no difficulty in concurring with what I say.

In short, Madam, in all my reading, I remember but one instance where beauty, by the tribute it paid interpretatively, acknowledged a superiority in our sex; for its oddness you will allow me to mention it, it is sa much to our honour I cannot pass it over.

In the fifteenth century, it happened there lived a man in France, Alain Chartier by name, from whose lips so many bons mots and fine sentences had issued, that Margaret Stuart, then wife to the Dauphin, passing one day with her attendants through a chamber where the good man lay asleep, taking it perhaps into her head, that possibly his lips might be as sweet as the words that came out of them, gently stooped and gave him a kiss.

Whether the good man at that time was in any such reverie as might give him a sense of his felicity, as the history is silent in this point, I know not; but this I know, that had I been Alain, and your ladyship the dau

phiness, though I had been master of the sentences, I was going to say, even author of the Book of Proverbs, I would have accepted this honour in compensation and full payment for the whole, as of more value than the annual prizes distributed by the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, or even those more renowned of old at the Isthmian games.

As upon this little anecdote curious and intelligent readers may possibly make some shrewd remark, it is fit I be before-hand with them, with one of my own; first intimating to the fair ladies of this town, the instruction easily to be collected from it, viz. "That merit is not confined to certain habits, colours, or modes of dress; that it may as often be found under a band or a cassock, as under a sword-knot or feather."

The consequence, I must needs tell them, is fairly drawn, and to several, now in my eye, may be of singular use, by making them hereafter more delicate, and more discreet in the distribution of their favours.

The learned have distinguished kisses into three kinds; one denoting duty or the office of friendship, another sweetness or the office of love, and a third-or here therefore a controversy is likely to arise among critics, under which of these predicaments the kiss given by this good lady to the philosopher ought to be classed: and because the learned are divided about the proper idea marked out by the two last †, after offering to their consideration

Oscula, Suavia, Basia.

The commentator upon Apuleius insists, that Basium gives the idea of sweetness, osculum pudicorum, and Suavium that of osculorum impudicorum. Apuleius uses basium in this sense I grant, and his commentator to his adds the authority of Catellus, not inconsiderable. But Petronius, as good, or perhaps better, authority than either, constantly uses basium in the latter sense, as any one may see from many passages in his Satyricon. It is certainly dignus vindice nodus: and therefore to be hoped, that some of the golden asses of the age, who, being initiated into the mysteries of the chaste goddess, often at the nocturnal assemblies of the bona dea, and undergone such metamorphosis as Apuleius did, will help us to solve it. VOL. I.

the reason of my own perplexity, I shall only beg, in defence of the fair, that till it is decided, the modesty of the dauphiness may pass unsuspected; for whether she, at a proper opportunity, supposing Monsieur Chartier to have been a Cadenus or Abelard, might have been drawn so far into the platonic scheme, as to have played the Eloisa or Varussa, without judging from the character of her kinswoman, Mary Queen of Scots, presumptively, that certain qualities run in the blood, I see no medium of proof that can lead to demonstration.

Be this as it will, what I have just now mentioned hints to me a reason for expressing a latent serious wish, that whenever your ladyship enters into the holy state of wedlock, some worthy nobleman of your own country may be the happy man: that we may have among us some of that breed which stands so glorious in the lists of fame, foremost in the catalogue of British worthies; by whose blood tyranny was subdued, and liberty established upon everlasting foundations.