“But do come; change your dress, return and dine with me; you will have just time, Harley. You will meet the most eminent men of our party; surely they are worth your study, philosopher that you affect to be.”
Thus said Audley Egerton to Lord L’Estrange, with whom he had been riding (after the toils of his office). The two gentlemen were in Audley’s library,—Mr. Egerton, as usual, buttoned up, seated in his chair, in the erect posture of a man who scorns “inglorious ease;” Harley, as usual, thrown at length on the sofa., his long hair in careless curls, his neckcloth loose, his habiliments flowing simplex mundit is, indeed, his grace all his own; seemingly negligent, never slovenly; at ease everywhere and with every one, even with Mr. Audley Egerton, who chilled or awed the ease out of most people.
“Nay, my dear Audley, forgive me. But your eminent men are all men of one idea, and that not a diverting one, politics! politics! politics! The storm in the saucer.”
“But what is your life, Harley?—the saucer without the storm?”
“Do you know, that’s very well said, Audley? I did not think you had so much liveliness of repartee. Life! life! it is insipid, it is shallow,—no launching Argosies in the saucer. Audley, I have the oddest fancy—”
“That of course,” said Audley, dryly; “you never had any other. What is the new one?”
HARLEY (with great gravity).—“Do you believe in Mesmerism?”
AUDLEY.—“Certainly not.”
HARLEY.—“If it were in the power of an animal magnetizer to get me out of my own skin into somebody’s else! That’s my fancy! I am so tired of myself,—so tired! I have run through all my ideas,—know every one of them by heart. When some pretentious impostor of an idea perks itself up and says, ‘Look at me,—I ‘m a new acquaintance,’ I just give it a nod, and say ‘Not at all, you have only got a new coat on; you are the same old wretch that has bored me these last twenty years; get away.’ But if one could be in a new skin, if I could be for half-an-hour your tall porter, or one of your eminent matter-of-fact men, I should then really travel into a new world.’ Every man’s brain must be a world in itself, eh? If I could but make a parochial settlement even in yours, Audley,—run over all your thoughts and sensations. Upon my life, I ‘ll go and talk to that French mesmerizer about it.”
[If, at the date in which Lord L’Estrange held this conversation
with Mr. Egerton, Alfred de Musset had written his comedies, we
should suspect that his lordship had plagiarized from one of them
the whimsical idea that he here vents upon Audley. In repeating it,
the author at least cannot escape from the charge of obligation to a
writer whose humour is sufficiently opulent to justify the loan.]