penny Post-bag." These are essences, are "nests of spicery," bitter and sweet, honey and gall together. No one can so well describe the set speech of a dull formalist[1], or the flowing locks of a Dowager,
"In the manner of Ackermann's dresses for May."
His light, agreeable, polished style pierces through the body of the court—hits off the faded graces of "an Adonis of fifty," weighs the vanity of fashion in tremulous scales, mimics the grimace of affectation and folly, shews up the littleness of the great, and spears a phalanx of statesmen with its glittering point as with a diamond broach.
"In choosing songs the Regent named
'Had I a heart for falsehood fram'd:'
While gentle Hertford begg'd and pray'd
For 'Young I am, and sore afraid.'"
- ↑ "There was a little man, and he had a little soul,
And he said, Little soul, let us try," &c.—Parody on
"There was a little man, and he had a little gun."—
One should think this exquisite ridicule of a pedantic effusion might have silenced for ever the automaton that delivered it: but the official personage in question at the close of the Session addressed an extra-official congratulation to the Prince Regent on a bill that had not passed—as if to repeat and insist upon our errors were to justify them.
