AUX PETITS SOINS.

Petits soins! Alte là, my dear little women, coquettes, prudes, and platonists; and you who are none of these, but have just philosophy enough at the ends of your rosy fingers, to prefer that pleasant series of intellectual sensations, which come of the petits soins of an agreeable and clever man, with all their imaginative enjoyments, which are followed neither by satiety nor remorse, but are yet far removed from a “cool suspense from pleasure and from pain.”

French women understand this gracious era in the progress of a “sentiment,” much better than the English. They have the prudence to put off the evil day, when it shall be no more, as long as they can; and they have the wit and information to fill up the interval between growing prepossession, and unequivocal passion. They have a still more precious art—that of inspiring les petits soins, when les grands have passed for ever. In England, indifference treads closely on the steps of love—in France, the most lasting and tender friendship is made up of the fragments of an old passion.