the utmost strictness short of inhumanity;
there should be the firmest adherence to the
spirit of the contract short of a too obstinate
adherence to the letter.

GENERAL AND MRS. DELORMO.

UNCLE JOHN has been the terror and
admiration of all our family for twenty years. He
has passed his whole life in town, and it is
amazing what an immense advantage that
gives him over his country relations. He
knows everything; and convicts my cousin
(who farms his own land in Devonshire) of
ignorance of the first principles of agriculture,
and writes letters filled with shiploads of
guano and successions of crops. He also
superintends the navigation of another cousin
who has gone thirteen voyages to China, in
command of a twelve hundred ton ship. He
is, in fact, profuse of his advice on all subjects
and at all times. And the provoking part of
it is, he is constantly right. He waits his
time, and a blight comes on the potatoes
in Devonshire, or a storm dismasts the
merchantman off the Cape: then he triumphantly
dwells on the hints he gave about farming
and seamanship, and, as he is unmarried, and
has thirty thousand pounds in the funds,
there is not a word to be said.

I don't think I am a favourite. He is
fond of talent—he meets so much of it
at his clubs and everywhere else in
London—and I have none. In short, I
sometimes think he considers me rather deficient
in intellect. Perhaps I am. He has told
me two or three times I am a fool, but
he used to do the same perpetually when I
was at school, and always accompanied the
unpleasant observation with a tip. This
leads to an agreeable association of ideas,
and I rather like to hear him revert to his
old opinion. When I told him I was going
to be married, and to whom, he was very
decided in his declaration of my silliness; but
when the deed was done, he furnished our
drawing-room, and presented Marianne with
a twenty-pound note. This seemed rather
odd to me, for he couldn't possibly have
thought Marianne a fool. Me, he is quite
welcome to despise—I never set up for a wit
or a learned man—but Marianne! I sent
him up her album, with such lovely poetry in
it. I am sure if she published, she would be
thought equal to Mrs. Hemans. There can
be no doubt whatever on the subject of my
wife's talents. I say nothing about her
beauty, nor about her speaking French, nor
about her music, nor about her thousand
brilliant accomplishments, which endear her
to all who have the delight of her acquaintance.
Many of her friends I confess become
jealous of her and leave off their visits—but
she doesn't care. She has a world of her own
into which she retires, and sometimes admits
me for a short time to hear the beautiful lines
she has been composing. Oh it is a splendid
world, the world of imagination, where
Marianne has everything her own way,
and talks of nothing else but roses and
tombstones.

For she is very melancholy in her verses,
is Marianne, and regularly makes me cry. We
married a year ago, and Uncle John refused
to be present at the wedding, but sent a note
to say that he liked me very much as a
goodnatured honourable ass, and could not refuse
his consent, since I seemed to have chosen a
very congenial mate. This was very kind,
for of course he did not mean the ass to have
the slightest reference to Marianne. So, we
accepted his blessing, and twenty pounds to
purchase a pony. We fled from the noisy
haunts of men. Marianne insisted on that.
We left the metropolis behind us, and found
out a nest of sylvan blessedness (Marianne's
own expression), in a village near the New
Forest, in Hampshire. She wouldn't let me
call it a village. She insisted on its always
being talked of as our hamlet, and in fact,
she wrote some lines upon it in the first month
of our residence, which I sent to Uncle John,
and which he said were below contempt. I
did not tell her this cruel opinion. How could
I? I thought the lines very clever. Here
they are:

"On the difference between Shakespeare's Hamlet

                               and ours.

   " Of Shakespeare's Hamlet we are never tired;
     Our Hamlet too is very much admired,"

Nothing could be neater or more complete,
and she composed them in so short a time!
I don't think the whole poem occupied her
above an hour.

I saw she began to hate Uncle John, though
of course she never suspected him of such
ridiculous bad taste as to be really indifferent
to her productions. She began to hate other
people too. In fact, she soon began in our
sylvan solitude to be rather ready to take
offence. Our curate called—a nice old gentleman
as ever I saw—always pottering about
in the poor people's cottages, and I have heard
giving away more half-crowns than he received
for salary. He had only been in London
once in his whole life, and that was forty
years ago, and he had read only one poet
since Tom Warton—whoever Tom Warton
may be, for I never heard of him—and that
was Bowles. He knew nothing of Byron or
Moore, but had a great lot of absurd looking
books in the small dining room in the old
parsonage house, which were all covered up
in parchment, with their names written in
old letters on the back. I saw one, once, on
the table, and it was either in Greek or
German, I could hardly make out which—
but very learned—and must have been nearly
impossible to understand. We got on
famously at first. Marianne was enchanted
with his fine old white hair and gentle
manners; but, all of a sudden, when he told
us of the dangers of intellectual pride, and