Alas!—either in letters or in politics, how utterly poor, barren, and untempting, is every path that points upward to the mockery of public eminence, when looked upon by a soul that has any real elements of wise or noble; unless we have an impulse within, which mortification chills not—a reward without, which selfish defeat does not destroy.
But, unblest by one friend really wise or good, spoilt by the world, soured by disappointment, Godolphin’s very faculties made him inert, and his very wisdom taught him to be useless. Again and again—as the spider in some cell where no winged insect ever wanders, builds and rebuilds his mesh,—the scheming heart of the Idealist was doomed to weave net after net for those visions of the Lovely and the Perfect which can never descend to the gloomy regions wherein mortality is cast. The most common disease to genius is nympholepsy—the saddening for a spirit that the world knows not. Ah! how those outward disappointments which should cure, only feed the disease!
The dinner at Saville’s was gay and lively, as such entertainments with such participators usually are. If nothing in the world is more heavy than your formal banquet,—nothing, on the other hand, is more agreeable than those well-chosen laissez aller feasts at which the guests are as happily selected as the wines; where there is no form, no reserve, no effort; and people having met to sit still for a few hours are willing to be as pleasant to each other as if they were never to meet again. Yet the conversation in all companies not literary turns upon persons rather than things; and your wits learn their art only in the School for Scandal.
“Only think, Fanny,” said Saville, “of Clavers turning beau in his old age! He commenced with being a jockey; then he became an electioneerer; then a Methodist parson; then a builder of houses; and now he has dashed suddenly up to London, rushed into the clubs, mounted a wig, studied an ogle, and walks about the Opera House swinging a cane, and, at the age of fifty-six, punching young minors in the side, and saying tremulously, ‘We young fellows!’”
“He hires pages to come to him in the Park with three-cornered notes,” said Fanny, “he opens each with affected nonchalance; looks full at the bearer; and cries aloud—‘Tell your mistress I cannot refuse her:’—then canters off, with the air of a man persecuted to death!”
“But did you see what an immense pair of whiskers Chester has mounted?”
“Yes,” answered a Mr. De Lacy; “A—— says he has cultivated them in order to ‘plant out’ his ugliness.”
“But vy you no talk, Monsieur de Dauphin?” said the Linettini gently, turning to Percy; “you ver silent.”
“Unhappily, I have been so long out of town that these anecdotes of the day are caviare to me.”
“But so,” cried Saville, “would a volume of French Memoirs be to any one that took it up for the first time; yet the French Memoirs amuse one exactly as much as if one had lived with the persons written of. Now that ought to be the case with conversations upon persons. I flatter myself, Fanny, that you and I hit off characters so well by a word or two, that no one who hears us wants to know anything more about them.”