AQ Our Inquiring Correspondents. [ Jan. 
some scoundrel, with the blackest whiskers, and the most scoundrel 
habits possible. He sighs, seduces, and looks melancholy, with the 
most bewitching air in the world. A Frenchwoman, the antipodes of 
Lucretia, and only too captivating, too exquisitely frivole, and too like a 
bird-of-paradise, to be like any thing else in this life but an Opera 
dancer, absorbs the sensitive soul of this model of lovely hazard to human 
bosoms ; and De Lisle, dangerous and delightful De Lisle, gives prac- 
tical lessons through three solid volumes, for which I rather hope than 
believe that the world will be the better. 
*« The same authoress has just sent forth another novel, of which the 
newspapers, in their style of panegyric, say, that ‘the nature and situa- 
tions remind one of what we hear and see every day in the streets.’ Very 
probably, Sir; and, in consequence of my reading the lady’s former 
work, I shall not read this. I am satisfied with her displays in drawing- 
rooms. 
« Another authoress follows in the same fashionable track. The 
Honourable Mrs. Norton, as the papers say, ‘ young, tender, beautiful, 
and moving in the first circles.’ I sincerely hope that long may she 
move there. But where did she go to look for her book, ‘ The Sorrows 
of Rosalie ?’ 
The heroine of this poem is one of those persons whose appellation is 
more easily conceived than properly announced to the general ear. She 
is like all her tribe, too lovely, tender, young, and so forth, to be satisfied 
with moving in the circles where she was bred, and she soon finds a guide 
to others of a more miscellaneous kind. She, in consequence of her 
change of conceptions, becomes, as the French delicately express it, ‘a 
mother before she is a wife; and thus germinates the rest of the history 
of this young and tender personage, moving in the first circles of the 
Strand. The fair authoress hunts the victim with a lynx eye through 
the rather oblique avenues of her memoirs. Rosalie, the lovely Rosalie, 
nightly walks the path so often interrupted by the beadle, until she sinks, 
and, urged by hunger, turns thief, and is taken up. She, as they all do 
in novels and poems, finally makes her way back to the country ; finds 
her father dying, reads the Bible for him; looks excessively pale but 
pretty still, and leaves the moral of her love and beauty, her tenderness 
and youth, for those who move in the first circles. 
“Now, Sir, could the Honourable Mrs. Norton, in the whole range 
of her fancy, find no better topic for her pen? Disguise the story as we 
may, it is the story of a harlot, the common story of one among the 
thousands that scandalize our streets; and are the joys and sorrows 
of this miserable, drunken, and degraded race, to be the theme of a 
young poetess, moving in the first circles, or in any circles but those of 
the tread-mill? Or with what feeling of propriety can such topics be 
dwelt on by females jealous of the character that constitutes the excel- 
- lence of woman ? 
“The poetry of ‘ Rosalie’ is pretty, and the writer possesses ability ; 
but the subject is unpardonable, and enough to extinguish all merit in 
the execution. 
“« The authoresses alluded to will know that they have no right to feel 
offended by even severer remarks. Let them think of what they are doing 
by making such topics popular among their own class. Their names 
sanction the passage of their works into the boarding-schools and bou- 
doirs of the nobility. Is there not hazardous knowledge enough there 
already? Is there any want of additional teachers of the stratagems of 
