You must have observed that I give my heroines extreme refinement, joined to great simplicity and want of education.  Now, refinement and want of education are incompatible, at least I have ever found them so:  so here again, you see, I am forced to have recourse to imagination, and certainly it furnishes me with creatures as unlike the sophisticated beings of civilized existence, as they are to the still less tempting, coarse realities of vulgar life.  In short, I am of opinion that poets do not require great beauty in the objects of their affection; all that is necessary for them is a strong and devoted attachment from the object, and where this exists, joined to health and good temper, little more is required, at least in early youth, though with advancing years, men become more exigeants.”  Talking of the difference between love in early youth and in maturity, Byron said, “that, like the measles, love was most dangerous when it came late in life.”

New Monthly Magazine.

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UMBRELLAS.

By one of the year 1750.

Umbrellas, in my youth, were not ordinary things; few but the macaronis of the day, as the dandies were then called, would venture to display them.  For a long while it was not usual for men to carry them without incurring the brand of effeminacy, and they were vulgarly considered as the characteristics of a person whom the mob hugely disliked, namely, a mincing Frenchman!  At first, a single umbrella seems to have been kept at a coffee-house for some extraordinary occasion—­lent as a coach or chair in a heavy shower—­but not commonly carried by the walkers.  The Female Tatler advertises, “the young gentleman belonging to the custom-house who, in fear of rain, borrowed the umbrella from Wilks’ Coffee-House, shall the next time be welcome to the maid’s pattens.”  An umbrella carried by a man was obviously then considered as extreme effeminacy.  As late as in 1778, one John Macdonald, a footman, who has written his own life, informs us that when he used “a fine silk umbrella, which he had brought from Spain, he could not with any comfort to himself use it; the people calling out ‘Frenchman! why don’t you get a coach?’” The fact was that the hackney-coachmen and the chairmen, joining with the true esprit de corps, were clamorous against this portentous rival.  This footman, in 1778, gives us further information.  “At this time there were no umbrellas wore in London, except in noblemen’s and gentlemen’s houses, where there was a large one hung in the hall to hold over a lady or a gentleman, if it rained between the door and their carriage.”  His sister was compelled to quit his arm one day from the abuse he drew down on himself and his umbrella.  But he adds, that “he persisted for three months till they took no further notice of this novelty.  Foreigners began to use theirs, and then the English.  Now it is become a great trade in London.”  This footman, if he does not arrogate too much to his own confidence, was the first man distinguished by carrying and using a silken umbrella.  He is the founder of a most populous school.  The state of our population might now in some degree be ascertained by the number of umbrellas.