witty, it is almost equally heartless, and impresses us with uncomfortable, and perhaps sometimes unjust, conceptions of human nature in its patrician phases. By her own showing, Madame du Deffand could never love anything. Take them en masse, and Mrs. Gore's characters—those who have anything characteristic about them—seem to labour under the same impotency. The Parisian réunions must have been highly delightful to those who, as Jeffrey says, sought only for amusement; "but not only does amusement not constitute happiness, but also it cannot afford much pleasure to those who have not other sources of happiness.” And thus even the amusement derivable from the society of "Mothers and Daughters," and the "Hamiltons," and their various concentric circles, soon palls on our taste, and the smile is exchanged for a sigh. There is much good in the world of fashion, according to the historian of "Bleak House," and there are many good and true people in it. "But the evil of it is, that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air." Little profit is there, and not much pleasure, in assignations with that drawing-room divinity, affectation:
who rules the vain, capricious throng,
Twines the soft limb, and tunes the lisping tongue,
Bids every hour the monstrous fashions veer,
And guides the toss, the simper, and the leer.[1]
But when we do parley with the species, it is as well to do so with a sprightly satirist as dragoman. And Mrs. Gore's style of interpretation is so piquant and amusing, that these "strangers and foreigners" become very passable for a time.
To give a catalogue raisonne of her writings on bon ton in all its branches, is more than we undertake. It would involve a larger expenditure of time and paper than we can just now afford; for we cannot, like her, write against time, upon ream after ream of foolscap. To enumerate her "entire works" would be a task proper for arithmetical recreationists. We will not attempt it, until 'we have gone through Baxter’s three hundred and sixty-six quartos (that is, some allege, one for every day in the year, plus an extra one for leap year), or the integral series of books registered at last Leipzig fair.
Whoso admires "Pelham; or, the Adventures of a Gentleman," will own to a like sympathy with "Cecil; or, the Adventures of a Coxcomb." A coxcomb of the first magnitude is the Hon. Cecil Danby. And notwithstanding the effeminate tendency inherent in the very constitution of coxcombry, there is reason to marvel how a female hand could have moulded so shrewd, dashing, and exquisite a petit maître. Byron complained of the specimens extant in his days:
We have no accomplish'd blackguards like Tom Jones,
But gentlemen in stays, as stiff as stones.
Cecil is one who flourished in Byrons days, and who claims extensive acquaintance with the noble lord; but he deserves to be credited with the accomplishments, minus the blackguardisms, after which the poet
- ↑ The Reigning Vice. Book V.
