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38 brother. There is no attachment stronger, more unselfish, than the love between brother and sister, thrown on the world orphans at an early age, with none to love them save each other. They feel how much they stand alone, and this draws them more together. Constant intercourse has given that perfect understanding which only familiarity can do; hopes, interests, sorrows, are alike in common. Each is to either a source of pride; it is the tenderness of love without its fears, and the confidence of marriage, without its graver and more anxious character. The fresh impulses of youth are all warm about the heart. It would have been an impossibility for Flora to have attached herself to Edward Waverley. A woman must look up to love: she may deceive herself, but she must devoutly believe in the superiority of her lover. With one so constituted as Flora—proud, high-minded, with that tendency to idealise inseparable from the imagination, Flora must have admired before she could have loved. The object of her attachment must have had something to mark him out from "the undistinguishable many." Now, Edward Waverley is just like nine-tenths of our acquaintance, or at least what they seem to us—pleasant, amiable, and gentlemanlike, but without one atom of the picturesque or the poetical about them. Flora is rather the idol of his imagination than of his heart, and it might well be made a question whether he be most in love with the rocky torrent, the Highland harp, the Gaelic ballad, or the lovely singer. They would have been unhappy had they married. Flora's decision of temper would have deepened into harshness, when placed in the unnatural position of exercising it for a husband; while Edward would have had too much quickness of perception not to know the influence to which he submitted—he would have been mortified even while too indolent to resist. Respect and reserve would have become their household deities; and where these alone reign, the hearth is but cold. Rose Bradwardine is just the ideal of a girl—simple, affectionate, ready to please and to be pleased—likely to be formed by her associates, ill-fitted to be placed in difficult situations; but whose sweet and kindly nature is brought out by happiness and sunshine. She would be content to gaze on the plans her husband drew for "ornamental grottoes and temples," and, content that they were his, ask not if his talents did not need a more useful range and a higher purpose. Rose would have kept her husband for ever at Waverley Honour—Flora would have held Shame to the coward thought that ere betrayed The noon of manhood to a myrtle shade. But, alas! to such—the decided and the daring—Fate deals a terrible measure of retribution. I know nothing in the whole range of fiction—that fiction whose truth is life—so deeply affecting as "Flora in a large gloomy apartment, seated by a latticed window, sewing what seemed to be a garment of white flannel." It is the shroud of her brother—the last of his ancient line—the brave—the generous—the dearly-loved Fergus! How bitter is her anguish when she exclaims, "The strength of mind on which Flora prided herself has murdered her brother! Volatile and ardent, he would have divided his energies amid a thousand objects. It was I who taught him to concentrate them. Oh! that I could recollect that I had but once said to him, 'He that striketh with the sword shall die by the sword !'"