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Europe. His éclat thus enhanced, poor Mrs. Percy will make herself more ridiculous than ever. By the way, my dear, I recommend you to marry Penrhyn, and put them both out of their pain."

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Pray, find them some other cure," said I. "The thing I like least is a dowager dandy-a superannuated London manan out-pensioner of White's-without an idea or an ambition beyond St. James's Street. Your Mr. Penrhyn connaît bien son Londres, but he knows nothing else; I never saw such a cut-and-dried specimen of his caste."

"There is more in him, however," said Lady Cecilia, rising to take leave," than you seem to have had wit to discover. The man has a gift of solemn irony, which victimizes even the most wary. But for the diversion he has found in making game of the Percy by his persiflage, he never would have had patience with her vagaries."

"I certainly had not the wit to discover all this," said I, interrupting Lady Cis; "or it would have determined me to close my doors against Mr. Penrhyn.”

18th.-My visiting list already extends to many pages; including the various connexions, near and remote, of the families of Montresor and Delaval. Lady Cecilia, too, has presented me to her own set of acquaintance; many of them, I fear, "pleasant, but wrong." I do not, at least, feel safe in their society; nor can I help listening to ascertain whether the ice on which we are sliding together be not giving way under our feet. Would that Armine and my brother-in-law were arrived!

A pleasant dinner yesterday at Sir Richard and Lady Dunbar's: a well-appointed establishment-handsome plate, excellent cook. But one feels invited there to render them justice. Lady Dunbar piques herself on her proficiency in the etiquettes of life, and loves to impress you with due admiration of her savoir vivre; but not a creature was ever welcomed to the house from the genuine impulse of hospitality. Their dinners have established them in society-obtained him the entree of the best clubs—and, in some shower of coronets produced by the stormy state of the political atmosphere, will, perhaps, buy him into the peerage. "Prejudice apart," whispered Mr. Penrhyn to me yesterday, at dinner, "this potage à la financière deserves the Upper house."

The first time I accompanied Lady Cecilia Delaval to old Lady Kent's card-party, I was much amused by the uneasy manner in which she was addressed by a certain Lady Mardynville,-evidently in an agony lest Lady Cis should present the new woman" to her.

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"Have mercy on Sir Robert and Lady Mardynville, and do not look hard at them till they have ascertained that you are worthy of their acquaintance," whispered my friend, with assumed gravity.

"And what are they, of mine?" I asked, as the baronet and his wife scudded fussily out of the way of an introduction.

"Heaven forbid that such pains-taking people should be lightly spoken of," she replied. "Two more persevering distinction-hunters never climed the ladder of society. From the day of their sympathetic union, they have neither eaten, drunk, nor slept, with any other object before their eyes than their own aggrandizement in those of the world. Not a levee, not a drawing-room, that they do not attend; not a royal porter's book in which the names of Sir Robert and Lady Mardynville are not inscribed with 'damnable iteration;' not a ministerial lacquey, to whom their liveries are not familiar as Punch's puppet-show. They have deserted their family place, to hire a residence within view of the flag-staff of Windsor Castle; and were heard to congratulate each other one winter, when their children caught the measles at Brighton at the same moment with Prince George. Sir Robert used to answer every body's inquiries with assurances that little Bobby was better, and Prince George quite out of danger."

Such was Cecilia's definition of the amiable couple who so manifestly despised me; and last night, at the Dunbar's, they fully justified her diatribe. When they entered the room, the Duke of Merioneth happened to sit next me on the sofa, conversing in that familiar whisper by which he thinks proper to mark to the world that he knows only those whom he knows intimately. The whisperee of a duke became, of course, a fine thing in the eyes of such people as the Mardynvilles. In the course of ten minutes, up came Lady Dunbar, all smiles, -Lady Mardynville, all courtesies,-determined to make my acquaintance.

"Long desirous of the honour-moving in the same circle -meeting night after night, without the privilege of speaking; so excessively awkward," &c. &c.

The duke rose, and stalked away to make room for my new friends; while Mr. Penrhyn shocked Sir Robert to death, by pretending to mistake his household button for that of the R. Y. C.!

This morning arrived cards, and, (without waiting to have them returned) an invitation for a dinner-party, three weeks hence.-Shan't go! What, but politics, can have been typified in the golden pippin of Ate? and what ages of discord has not the fatal fruit engendered? Yet, surely, the factions of Guelf and Ghibelline, or White and Red Rose, never carried their barbarian animosities to so unchristian a pitch, as the polite hatred of modern Whig and Tory? Since the triumph of the Catholic Question, political spleen has become a species of endemic at the west end; a cholera morbus never to be extirpated. It is considered a mark of caste among the fine ladies to "doat on the Duke of Wellington," or to "adore

the present ministry;" the intellectual coteries affecting the latter creed, the exclusives, the former. The ventilator, it seems, set their brains a-madding for a season or so; and, just as they all went hero-mad during the peninsular war, they became statesman-mad when the star of Canning, Brougham, or Stanley, raged as the dog-star of the hour.

And then they so dearly love a little bit of finesse, to sneak their pitiful way to a vote, either at Brookes's or in the house. Madame L- -n was the first to bring this sort of tripotage into fashion. So well-bred, so well dressed, nothing she did appeared amiss; like Cleopatra,

"Vilest things,

Became themselves in her, and holy bishops
Blessed her when"

she advocated the cause of holy alliance. From her more than one flighty dame derives a precedent for a system of intrigues, such as the Duchesse de Longueville night rise from her grave to applaud.

After all, the most able of female politicians makes herself as disagreeable as ridiculous. Women carry their sensibilities with them even into the ventilator, and exercise their feelings when they fancy they are exercising their judgment. They see through the eyes of their heart, and hear with its ears; and sometimes, unluckily, talk out of its abundance. Yester day, at the Delavals', a gradually rising murmur reached us from the end of the table furthest from the place where I was quietly eating my soup, which, at length, deepened into a decided storm. Mrs. Percy, and the old Duchess of Plymouth, were speaking, what they call their minds, the plainest English ever uttered by lips polite; each reviling the particular friends or particular party of the other. Lady Cecilia, who hates to have the pleasantness of her parties broken in upon, kept trying to pour oil upon the waves; but her oil was mere huile de roses, of too light a quality to subdue billows so uproarious; and Penrhyn, a dear lover of mischief, kept spurring the belligerents on to battle by little minikin-pin pricks of imperti

nence.

Now, of what use was all their squabbling, either to their party (their party!) or themselves? Not a word uttered by either, for arguments they did not attempt to utter, would have weighed against an eider-duck's feather! On one side it was always "It is well known that, if the duke thought proper, he might"-so and so; on the other, "Nothing but the paltry intrigues, and the under-hand cabals of the Tories have prevented". -so and so. What a draw-back upon rational conversation and social feeling! Better talk to all eternity of the weather, as we used to do in Ireland; or of chiffons, as I am told they do in Paris. Lady Cecilia declares that three

or four of the best houses in town have become insupportable during the last few years, on account of the state of parties; among others, that of her charming sister, the marchioness; where,

"Under which Club, Bezonian? Speak, or die!"

is the first inquiry made of every new pretender to her acquaintance.

George Hanton, who sat next me yesterday, during this battle of frogs and mice, could not conceal his indignation that the process of so good a dinner (when he happened to be in good appetite) should be disturbed by such impertinent bickering!

"What bores those women are!" he whispered to me, with a face of the deepest concern-"I protest I hardly know what I have got on my plate" and, with Hanton, such ignorance is any-thing but bliss. I remember him, ten years ago, coming to pass the holidays at Lord Randall's in Staffordshire, when Armine and I were young and disengaged; and then, as now, having eyes only for an entrée. His time and fortune are spent in ministering to his palate; and a first-rate education seems to have instructed him in nothing but the gormandizings of mankind. He recognizes the Spartans only by their black broth, and the Romans by the gluttonies of Apicius or Lucullus. Talk to him of the state of the arts during the middle ages, and he will answer that, in those times, forest venison was a most delicious thing; and, in the way of chronology, instead of dating from "before the invention of gunpowder,' or "the discovery of printing," George is apt to time his epochs by "before tea was brought into Europe," or "before potatoes were in general use." His acquaintance, nay his friends, are chosen selon the merits of their cook, or their power of appreciating the cooks of others. He was heard to exclaim of one of the greatest ministers of modern times, "I have a bad opinion of Lord I once saw what pretended

to be a suprême de volaille at his table, which was literally made of veal."

"And what then-do you suppose he ordered such a substitute?"

"No!--but what an opinion must his cook have had of his understanding, to venture on such a subterfuge; and, after all, who knows one better than one's cook?"-Hanton has dropped the acquaintance of the Mardynvilles, because their turbot is high instead of their venison, and refused to be presented to pretty little Lady Ryland, on account of the badness of her dinners. "It is time lost," said he, "to know such people," He invariably places himself next me at dinner; and I have discovered that my ignorance of gastronomic science constitutes my attraction.. I have not taste enough to secure the truffles, or the beaux morceaux of the made-dishes brought

round; and Mr. Hanton, as my next neighbour, profits by the oversight. I fear he will judge me unworthy of an invitation to one of his dinners, which I hear highly extolled by those, bien entendu, who hold

That to live well means nothing but to eat.

May 1.-What a beautiful city is London at this season of the year, when the spring breezes, dispersing both fog and smoke, afford glimpses of blue sky! What order in the streets; what courtesy, what splendour in the shops!-Regent Street, for instance, with its macadamized road covered with carriages, and wide pavements thronged with passengers, is a very type of the times;-all show and speculation,-all activity and superficiality. Then the west end squares, and the streets leading into Park Lane,—how dignifiedly dull;— "nothing to be seen there," as some would-be Brummel observed, "but the aristocracy, savoir, a population of lords and footmen." Each isolated mansion of that favoured region contains, within its little world, all that ingenuity and industry tender in exchange for wealth; the best productions of art, the newest combinations of science, the most graceful inventions of fancy; to render life more easy and exquisite for those who know not a discomfiture beyond the rumpling of the rose leaf!

Then the two quarters that arose under the reign of that king of the surfaces, George IV!-the Regent's Park,—the Athen's of the Bloomsburians; and Belgrave and Eaton Squares, the Place Vendôme, and Place de Louis XV., of our new lords and old bankers. There live the opulent and the ascendant, the Dunbars and the Mardynvilles. There dines Hanton,-there flirts Mrs. Percy;-while my friend Lady Cecilia, more aristocratic in her predilections, clings to the sobrieties of Grosvenor Square; whose ancient hall-chairs are polished, not by French varnish, but by much friction of generations of lacqueys, from the time when the link of Lady Mary Wortley's chairman was trust into the extinguisher, still suspended over the entrance.

Then we have Carlton Gardens, the Hesperides of Cabinet Ministers, which shifts its occupants with every change of administration. Were the ghosts of Fox and Sheridan to arise from the Abbey in the mists of some November morning, how would they marvel to behold the classic ground of Carlton House devoted to the hubbub of conservative clubs, or the gorgeous vulgarity of such satraps as Sir Bungalore Hooghly and Co.!

Till within these fifteen years, however, the domestic architecture of London hobbled far behind the march of luxury. A handsome town residence was then a show-house;-bathrooms, a gallery, and a little marble, and plate-glass, consti

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