Or: "She never speaks to any one, which is, of course, a great advantage to any one."
Mrs. Carlyle was an epigram herself—small, sweet, yet possessing a sting—and her letters give us many sharp and original sayings.
She speaks in one place of "Mrs. ——, an insupportable bore; her neck and arms were as naked as if she had never eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."
And what a comical phrase is hers when she writes to her "Dearest"—"I take time by the pig-tail and write at night, after post-hours"—that growling, surly "dearest," of whom she said, "The amount of bile that he brings home is awfully grand."
For a veritable epigram from an American woman's pen we must rely on Hannah F. Gould, who wrote many verses that were rather graceful and arch than witty. But her epitaph on her friend, the active and aggressive Caleb Cushing, is as good as any made by Saxe.
"Lay aside, all ye dead,
For in the next bed
Reposes the body of Cushing;
He has crowded his way
Through the world, they say,
And even though dead will be pushing."
Such a hit from a bright woman is refreshing.
Our literary foremothers seemed to prefer to be pedantic, didactic, and tedious on the printed page.
Catharine Sedgwick dealt somewhat in epigram, as when she says: "He was not one of those convenient single people who are used, as we use straw and cotton in packing, to fill up vacant places."
Eliza Leslie (famed for her cook-books and her satiric sketches), when speaking of people silent from stupidity, supposed kindly to be full of reserved power, says: "We cannot help thinking that when a head is full of ideas some of them must involuntarily ooze out."