Isaiah Warren, from the time he commenced his religious studies; and when he was licensed and entered on the duties of his sacred office, no young clergyman could be more devout and devoted. Fourteen years passed away-The Rev. David Lawton and Captain Isaiah Warren were both gathered to their fathers. They had died in full charity with each other, and in the assured belief, that Presbyterians and Congregationalists were to inherit the same heaven. But Mrs. Warren still lived-lived, to enjoy the pious triumph of seeing her favorite son installed as pastor over the destitute church of Harmony. And all this, she firmly believed was foretold her by the apparition. She was never undeceived-but the reader must be.

Isaiah Warren had a brother Benjamin, a wild, roguish, adventurous fellow, who finally went to sea, and was absent many years. After his return, as he was sitting one evening in his brother's study, telling such tales of his wondrous chances as sailors will tell, he remarked an air of incredulity on Isaiah's countenance, and instantly paused.

Why do you not proceed?' inquired Isaiah. 'You do not credit me,' returned Benjamin; 'and yet it does not require a greater degree of faith than you once exercised about an apparition.'

Isaiah saw the keen eye of his brother sparkle with mirth, and something that announced a triumph. In a moment the truth flashed on his mind. He started up, and striking the table with a volume of Baxter's "Saint's Rest,"

(the favorite book, next to the Bible, of his father-in-law, the late Mr. Lawton,) as if the said book had been a batten, he exclaimed'Ben, I know you were that apparition!'

After a hearty laugh, Ben confessed the whole. 'I was,' said he, 'down close by the river, among some bushes at your feet, where I had crept to fix a trap for a mink, and there I lay and heard all your conversation with ' Lois. After you had gone, thinks I to myself, I will even play the trick on mother, and it will be no sin, for I am not intending to be a minister. So I wrapped up myself, and stole into mother's room, on tiptoe, and I said "Isaiah must study with Mr. Lawton," and then was out again in the twinkling of an eye. That was all I did say, and that about your being saved, was no words of mine. When I found how seriously the affair was taken, I did not dare to own what I had done. But, on the whole, I think it was a good thing. You obtained your wife, and the people were all made more peaceable and christianlike, and no bad effect has followed. This, I guess, happened, because I was not influenced by any bad or selfish motives, for our chaplain always said, that it was only the indulgence of selfishness that caused us to sin.'

WILLIAM FORBES.

O! wherefore with a rash impetuous aim
Seek ye those flowery joys with which the hand
Of lavish Fancy paints each flattering scene
Where Beauty seems to dwell, nor once inquire
Where is the sanction of eternal Truth,
Or where the seal of undeceitful Good
To save your search from folly! Wanting these,
Lo, Beauty withers in your void embrace.

AKENSIDE

'What answer did Elizabeth give?'

THOSE readers, who have been sufficiently interested in the work, to retain a recollection of the contents of the fifth Sketch, may remember, that The Village Schoolmistress' was left undecided respecting the answer she should make to the matrimonial suggestion of her recreant but repentant lover, William Forbes.

We have given her six months to consider the matter, and in this steam age of the world, no woman ought to require a longer time to make up her mind. What enviable advantages the antediluvian ladies enjoyed! They might reflect and reject, doubt and delay, consider and coquet, for at least three hundred years, without any risk of incurring that appalling epithet, which now, in the brief period of thirty, is sure to be bestowed on the fair one

who dares to remain in 'single blessedness.' Yet I never envied that longlived race. I am inclined to believe, the movement of the spirit was then as sluggish as the course of time. It must have been so, or the body could not for so long a season have resisted the efforts of the soul to escape from its prison house. And this sluggishness must have infected their literature. What interminable, prosing articles, many of our writers are even now inclined to perpetrate, and if their hours might be lengthened to years, would infallibly inflict upon the public! Nothing but the necessity of accommodating himself to the proverbial speed of time, will induce your thorough quillloving author, to come to the conclusion of his favorite argument or article. And from this mania of 'long talks,' which seems inherent in most writers, we may safely conclude, that those men of a thousand years, would not neglect their mighty privilege of making folios. To be sure, in the dullest of all dull matter-offact knowledge, chronology and genealogy, they had the means of excelling. But romance -dear, delightful romance-what chance for a romance writer, when every event that had occurred since creation was within the memory of man! And how could they write poetry, among such an unchanging and deathless generation? It would not certainly be the poetry of feeling-melting, moving, melancholy poetry; for instance, like that most beautiful of all Burns's beautiful productions, 'Highland Mary.' And where did they find

metaphors to express the long unfading duration of the youth they must have enjoyed? Not in those bright, beautiful, but evanescent, or shifting things--buds and flowers-the morning and the moon. Only think of comparing the charms of a lovely girl, to the firmness of the mountain oak, or the unwasting, unvarying appearance of the solid rock! Then 、 they had no rainbow. Ah, they never wrote poetry-that's certain !

Other reasons, quite as pertinent and conclusive, might easily be offered, to prove what` a dull, cold, formal, changeless and charmless race they must have been,-but of all kinds of knowledge, I consider antiquarian lore as the most unwomanly. It must be gained by so much research, and explained by such learned terms, and defended by so many arguments, in the Sir Pertinax style of obstinacy, that, heaven defend me from ever meeting with that anomaly in our species--an antiquarian without a beard. Leaving it therefore, to some future Jonathan Oldbuck, as curious and communicative as he of Monkbarns, to pursue the inquiry respecting the precise age at which we may conclude a belle of the Nimrodian era, became an old maid, I will return to the explanation of those modern causes which gave to Elizabeth Brooks that uncoveted title.

I have said, or ought to have said, that William Forbes was an excellent scholar, the very first in his class, and, undoubtedly indebted for much of his mental superiority, to that circumstance, which is so often, and truly too,