LOVE IN IDLENESS.

How few love-novels are written now! The market is closed, and the commodity out of date. A Scotch gentleman visited us some time back, and amused himself, while the conversation was occupied by a group of morning callers, in examining the books in my husband’s study. He had pitched on a shelf of natural history, and his attention dwelt on Lacépède’s voluminous work on fishes. As he ran over the volumes successively, his voice rising in a climax of tone, with his increasing surprise, he exclaimed—“Fesh, fesh, fesh, hey! Sirs, what sax bukes all on fesh!!!” How many hundred thousand of bukes have been written “all upon love;” from the loves of Petrarch, in a thousand and one sonnets, to Mr. Moore’s “Loves of the Angels,” in one elegant volume! In what various ways too, the subject has been treated, from “Cassandra,” and “Le Grand Cyrus,” in folio, to the Nouvelle Héloise, in four goodly thick volumes! and so on to Werter, in a primmer size, which, bound in black velvet, was hung by a gold chain round the neck of its fair readers, before the age of sentiment had passed away! Sooner than write on love, a modern novellist has recourse to the Newgate Calendar, and the police reports of the Morning Herald.

The fact is, that there is less love in the world than there was; and the stock is daily diminishing. The reason is clear—there is less idleness, and consequently less of the concentration which goes to make passion. That terrible school-master too, who has, some how or other got abroad, whips out poor little Love, wherever he finds him,—“a domineering pedant o’er the boy;” and the utilitarians will not hear of the brat, with his anti-Malthusian doctrines, but hunt him from the boudoir to the tread-mill, to suffer and repent, with other young offenders. Cultivation, business, and education, are “the very beadles to an humorous sigh.”

The idlest nations are ever the most gallant; and Doctors’ Commons would have little to do, if the désœuvrés of fashion were reduced to assume the moral and physical activity of the tiers-état. The semi-civilized great are idle and intemperate: idle, by their institutions, which, being those of despotism, exclude the mass from a participation in national concerns; and intemperate, because wealthy idleness gives the desire and the means of excess. What scenes of wassailing and riot passed among the courtiers of Henry the VIIIth and Francis the Ist; and amongst those of Charles the IId, and the early part of the reign of Louis the XIVth. In the highest state of savagery, men are governed by appetite; in the highest degree of civilization they are guided by convenance. The Esquimaux, always in the field, and the Englishman always before the public, and occupied with commerce, politics, science, and the arts, have neither of them leisure to love, after the fashion of the Petrarchs and the Rousseaus.

Even now, however, we may have what the French of our days call “un sentiment,” which is a very pretty amusing thing, leaving no scar behind—heart, conscience, and character, all intact, “pourvu qu’on est sage,” (as a Frenchwoman said to me the other day): an item in the code of conduct, by the by, never looked for in the days of old French gallantry.