‘On Monday I was at a very great assembly at the Bishop of Saint Asaph’s. Conceive to yourself one hundred and fifty or two hundred people met together, dressed in the extremity of the fashion; painted as red as bacchanals; poisoning the air with perfumes; treading on each other’s gowns; making the crowd they blame; not one in ten able to get a chair; protesting they are engaged to ten other places; and lamenting the fatigue they are not obliged to endure; ten or a dozen card-tables, crammed with dowagers of quality, grave ecclesiastics, and yellow admirals; and you have an idea of an assembly.’ Roberts’ Memoirs of More 1. 242; cf. ib. 1. 311.
[182] Other contemporary descriptions of the salon will be found elsewhere in this volume. Still others—in general more fragmentary—may be consulted in Frances Brooke’s Excursion 1. 142, Roberts’ Memoirs of More 2. 22-23; 1. 92-93; 174; 317.
[183] Horace Walpole’s experiences in the English salons at Turin and Florence may be consulted in the first volume of his Letters. ‘Only figure the coalition of prudery, debauchery, sentiment, history, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and metaphysics; all, except the second, understood by halves, by quarters, or not at all’ 1. 82; 31 July 1740.
[184] This was an important matter with some of the bluestockings, as the following quotation from Hannah More may show: ‘I never knew a great party turn out so pleasantly as the other night at the Pepys’s. There was all the pride of London—every wit and every wit-ess ... but the spirit of the evening was kept up on the strength of a little lemonade till past eleven, without cards, scandal, or politics.’ Roberts’ Memoirs of More 1. 208.
Johnson’s opposition to anything of the sort is shown by his remark on ‘an evening society for conversation’: ‘There is nothing served about there, neither tea, nor coffee, nor lemonade, nor anything whatever, and depend upon it, Sir, a man does not love to go to a place from whence he comes out exactly as he went in.’ Boswell’s Life 4. 90.
He urged Mrs. Thrale to provide her guests with ‘a profusion of the best sweetmeats.’
[185] How true this is to the spirit of conversation is shown by a somewhat scandalous discussion of Miss Hannah More which passed between Mrs. Cholmondeley and Miss Burney: Mrs. Cholmondeley: ‘I don’t like her at all; that is, I detest her! She does nothing but flatter and fawn; and then she thinks ill of nobody. Don’t you hate a person who thinks ill of nobody?’ Diary of Mme. D’Arblay 1. 188.
[186] 1787. Act 3, scene 2.
[187] See her first conversation with Marlow, Act II. She herself calls it sentimental, in reference to these platitudes.
[188] Mélanges 3. 243.