a that of the tearful Niobe; he thinks their attitudes have more of the grace and sentiment of sorrow in them than your's. This is impertinent and unfeeling enough; but I verily believe that if his brother were about to endure what is technically termed the "Tyburn-tie," he would object to the taste of the county-valet, and would, perhaps, step up on the scaffold to change the knot to the "tie à la Cavendish." He is a critic in every thing, from a pin to a pyramid; from an epic to an epigram. He looks at Memnon's head (in the Museum) through microscope, and discovers that the granite is not without flaws. It is not easy to please him who cannot please himself. I should as soor hope to please a fleet-footed greyhound, by ordering him to be horseshoed. Did Apollo himself indulge his ear with a capriccio, he would play too flat or too sharp. It is no wonder, therefore, that Shakspeare shocks him; and that "his dramatic style is a bad one;" or that" Ben Jonson's works, taken altogether, are but trash." (Pope.) Milton, he agrees with Waller in considering as nothing more than "an old, blind schoolmaster, who wrote a poem," something about the loss of Paradise, or his pug-puppy, he forgets which, who, "if dulness and length are the principal requisites for a grand work,” certainly was a great author. You shew him a painting of Hope you have just finished; he asks you to let him look at Despair, and gives you to understand, by a certain smirk of conceit writhing in the corners of his mouth, which he would prefer if he had to marry either of them by the choice of her portrait. You shew him a sketch you have made for a grand picture of the Furies dragging Eurydice back to the infernal regions; and he asks you why you did not persuade the Furies to put their snakes in papers, "for you see they are horribly out of curl." You shew him your own portrait; he glances hastily at it, and says, "You have flattered the old gentleman too much," meaning your father. You assure him that it was intended for you, and he lifts up his brows with surprise, and assures you, in return, that it is not a bit like you; besides, "who would know it to be the portrait of a painter? Let it have some mark and likelihood in it. Why not throw in a touch or two of St. Luke's style--a bull's head and a pallet in it?" You do not suspect him then, and you paint another; and to pourtray your profession as well as yourself, you introduce the portrait of a favourite ass on the easel. You call him in ; and at the first glance he cries, "Why, what is this? Here is the ass's head to the left, and your's is to the right; but perhaps you designed to shew the same head in two positions?" You quarrel with him for his ill-nature; and then he begs your pardon for his severity, and confesses that he is a little out of temper, because he had pricked his fingers with "Gammar Gurton's needle, "in buying a Whitechapel* one; and then, to restore you to smiling, he says, "Tut, man, never be fretted by a sneer! Sneers are to a fine-spirited genius, what spurs are to a high-mettled horse-they prick him on to strong endeavour. Why, there was What's-his-name, the great fine-art-ist, sneered at me but yesterday, with his polar, cold-looking nose, (not that I consider myself a genius-Apollo forbid !) and why, guess you? * A cant phrase for a counterfeited copy of this old play. because I insisted that the toe-nail of the Piping Faun was a more perfect semicircle than the eyelid of John of Bologna's Couching Venus! I did not chafe and fret, and pull my wig upon my brow— not I! I coolly, and with all possible consideration, requested him, if he did not mean to saturate me with a cold, to favour me so much, when he sneered to-morrow at me, as to take the chill off his nose. The creature grinned his best Sardonic grin, (copied from an antique gem in his cabinet), and would have lent me his wife for my wit." You confide your new comedy to his hands; he looks at the cover, and admires its Grecian border, though he thinks "the Egyptian would have been more à propos, as the scene lies in England" (this is his manner of sneering); reads through the title down to " 1820," returns it, calls it a farce run to seed, advises you to study divinity, and sends you a pastoral discourse by old Toplady. Mrs. Jenkinson introduces her French shock-dog to him, and he shocks her, by declaring that he sees nothing in him but an animated hearth-rug. There is a line which I was in the ten years' innocent habit of admiring, for the beauty of its thought: "The conscious water saw its Lord, and blush'd:" he proved, perfectly to my dis-satisfaction, that it was nonsense; "for (said he) though blushing might give to the water the hue of wine, it required something more to give it the quality.” He is proud to be considered a man of taste, though he sometimes A friend of his allows that taste is a great maker of little minds. says of him, that "he is like the Lord Mayor's taster,— he makes a meal of no one dish, and is hungry with plenty before him." He is, however, a very gourmand in taste; and it is not a few dainties will satisfy his appetite. He picks a leg of the young Antinous; a bit of the breast of Canova's Venus; a lip of the Piping Faun; a knuckle of the Gladiator; the wing of an angel from the Cartoons; and a pope's eye from Lawrence's Pontiff;-these tid-bits serve for his morning repast. His more substantial, or dinner-meal, consists of an olla podrida of Lamb's tales, Crabbe's tales, and Hogg's tales,—a strangely-selected literary dish, all of which he tastes of, with a hungry ostrich sort of haste, grumbling as he picks them to pieces, like a gourmand who is fuller of spleen than satisfaction, when his soles are done to devils. Two dozen of Milton objections, instead of A mouthful of Bacon, one of ditto oysters, serve as a side dish. swallowed, with some complaints of there being too much of the Attic salt in it for his taste, and an insinuation that it has grown rusty from antiquity, and is not likely to be relished by high tastes, finishes the meal. His opinions are not worth much; but I was glad to hear him say, "that any lord who wrote poetry, and could be priggish enough to assert that Cowper was no poet, would be intemperate enough to take the next chair's wig off to wipe his own mouth with." II. The Nice, or Ladies' Man.-This is a sort of Tom Shuffleton grown flat, staid, and fortyish; a fop running to seed; just such a being as would have made Cowper's "wheel-footed chair, wide elbowed and wadded with hair," (for which he thanked Lady Hesketh pleasantly) a thorn-stool. He says, of such an one- "I cannot talk with civet in the room, A fine puss-gentleman, that's all perfume; Perhaps might prosper with a swarm of bees ; The ingredients which go to his composition, are a good face, white teeth, and regular (or, as a waggish friend of mine describes them, teeth which keep good hours); a nose that has neither sneers nor snuff about it, though it politely puts itself to the expense of maintaining a box for noses that carry their own sneers, but take anybody's snuff; a very moderate share of sense, and an immoderate share of nonsense, mixed according to the Gratiano recipe, (that is, in the proportion of two grains of wheat to two bushels of chaff); a voice that sounds agreeably musical in a "How-d'ye-do?" in the anti-room, in a quartett or conversation in any room, or in a "good night" at the extremity of the hall-stairs; a back which can bend like a willow to my Lord George, or my Lady Fanny; a smile and insinuated sovereign, which purchase my lord's butler, and procure him hot plates, choice bits, and frequent changes of both, besides careful helpings-on of great coats, infinite care-takings of hats, umbrellas, and walking-sticks, and gentle shuttings of hall and hackney-coach-doors after him; a smirk that does not displease my lady's confidential maid, when it is accompanied by something substantial though flimsy; hands white, long-fingered, and acorn-nailed, if convenient legs with some probability of calf; ancles as much superior to the Apollo Belvidere as possible; two eyes of one colour; whiskers and hair of his own growth; with washes, essences, lavender soaps, tooth-picks and powders, tight waist, tighter pantaloons, silkstockings, &c. &c. He is of an equable temper, lightly pleased, and not lightly displeased. He is as cheerful to-day as he was yesterday; his boots and his wit were equally brilliant yesterday and to-day. I have, however, known him melancholy; but that was when his " dear Chloe" was unkind, and would not confess (what he had some violent suspicions about) whether the crop of shavings he found on her toilette were the produce of that pretty piece of common-land, her chin. And then he talked of committing suicide, by throwing himself into the arms of the Dowager Countess Closefist, with 90,000 attractions a year; and then Chloe frowned him out of her presence; and then he came like a prodigal in penitence back again; and then Chloe forgave him, at the entreaties of a set of brilliants, valued at 200 guineas by Love; and then he was made so happy and tractable, that she sent him out of her house on the stilts of elevation just five minutes, by the gold repeater he had lately given her, before his rival, the Marquis, descended from his close carriage to fly to her arms and her drawing-room. He has not any opinions he has so many: but what he has are always your's. He agrees generally with the last speaker. He "He would not with a peremptory tone He humbly hopes, presumes it may be so." "Knows what he knows, as if he knew it not; Centering at last in having none at all." Being independent as to property, he may be considered as a kind of amateur toad-eater; a toad-eater, without the venom of one of these reptiles. If his lordship is disposed to be profoundly axiomatical, and says, that mock-turtle is not real turtle, he does not dispute it, but swallows my lord's mock-turtle and his real opinion at the same time. My lady asserts that Chaucer did not write Comus, and he confesses that the strength of her ladyship's assertion has staggered an opinion he had held to the contrary. If his lordship is merely witty, he always laughs in time and in tune. His laugh is loud, long, and peculiar; his acquaintance is therefore much cultivated by "wits among lords," and "lords among wits :" it is something like a chromatic run down the keys of the piano; whether it is to shew the soundness of his teeth, of organ-key whiteness and regularity, or the compass of his voice, or to convince you how wide he could yawn, if forced to it, and thus increase the value of his attention, by betraying how awful and grave-gaping his inattention would be, is perhaps known by himself. It is thought to be very cordial; so it is: there is but one thing I prefer to it, and that is an instrument which is now making under the exclusive patronage of high life, by which laughing is imitated in all its wide varieties, from the laugh obligato or forced, and the laugh reluctant or equivocatory, to the laugh delightful or satisfactory, and the laugh extempore or voluntary: I prefer this, because here I do not despise the man in the instrument. His other uses are,-to hand young ladies to carriages, and say nothing of their ancles, if they are not to his taste, and as much as he pleases if they are, so that it be not in their mammas' hearing; but it may be as much as possible in the hearing of any rival beauty who cannot boast of the "Milaine foot of fire." He may too, if there is an opportunity, insinuate that the foot of the blue-stocking Lady Sapphira Sapphic, is like a foot of the heroic measure (meaning a Life-guardsman's): this will not displease them, for they utterly abhor Lady Sapphira, because, at her last rout, her grooms squeezed into her room a thin young gentleman, and thereby had a majority of one over the number pressed in at the rout of the countess their mother's the preceding evening. To hand old ladies to their sedans on courtdays, and be as patient as Penelope in compressing them and their hoops into them. To quadrille with young ones, if a younger lord has not come to his time. To sit seriously and at ease with battered beauties and decayed dowagers, in winter-evenings, and look as if he had never been happier; and, if possible, remeniber the best days of the dowagers, and forget when the Honourable Miss Tittermouth combed her own hair, and giggled among her own teeth. To wait on lovely countesses at Almack's, between the dances; and serve lemonades, ices, and jellies with a page's precision, and a prince's politeness of back and body. To say handsome things to the ordinary Miss Honourables, and look unutterably handsome things to the beautiful ones. To shop with them at the jeweller's, once in a way; and admire their taste when they prefer French filigree to English reality and sterlingness. At the opera, to cry bravo for weak-voiced elderly lords, when Camporese sings; and clap no louder than the same, when fairy-footed Fanny Bias dances. These are his principal amusements, and, all together, they make up a very harmless sort of nice being, which one can no more object to than one can to honey and bread for breakfast, honey and biscuit for luncheon, honey and French-roll for dinner, honey and ladies'-fingers for tea, and honey and gingerbread for supper. UGOLINO.* THEN paused the sinner from his foul repast, Till, cleansed his lips from clotted blood and hair, The gloomy tale his accents thus declare : C. S. W. B. "Thou ask'st a thing, whose thought to desperate pain And, ere my tongue the direful scene unroll, But should these words, these tears, with guilt and shame Whose hateful scull with ravening tooth I bare- Bespeaks thee born on Arno's flowery strand. Thou hast not heard-and now thou art to hear. Through the small chink that air'd our narrow † mew- The only wretch there doom'd immured to die), Count Ugolino de' Gherardeschi sought to obtain the sovereignty of Pisa in 1288, and joined Ruggieri degli Ubaldini against Nino di Gallura. The former obtained their object, but afterwards quarrelling, Ruggieri betrayed Ugolino by false representations, and heading the enraged people, they imprisoned him and two of his sons in a tower on the Piazza degli Anzioni, where they were starved to death. The tower has since been called "La torre della fame," The tower of famine.-See Dante, Inferno, Canto 33. +"Muda."-Dante. |