In the last age, Lord Chesterfield set the mark of the beast, as he called it, on certain vulgarisms in pronunciation, which he succeeded in banishing from good company. I wish we could set the mark of the bore upon all which has been contaminated by his touch,—all those tainted beauties, which no person of taste would prize. They must be hung up viewless, for half a century at least, to bleach out their stains.
I invite every true friend of literature and of good conversation, blues and antis, to contribute their assistance in furnishing out a list of quotations to be proscribed. Could I but accomplish this object, I should feel I had not written in vain. To make a good beginning, I will give half a dozen of the most notorious.
“The light fantastic toe,” has figured so long in the newspapers, that an editor of taste would hardly admit it now into his columns.
“Pity is akin to love,”—sunk to utter contempt; along with—“Grace is in all her steps;” and “Man never is, but always to be blest;”—“Youth at the prow, and pleasure at the helm;”—no longer safe on a boating party.
The bourgeois gentilhomme has talked prose too long without knowing it.
“No man is a hero to his valet de chambre,”—gone to the valets themselves.
“Le secret d’ennyer est celui de tout dire,”—in great danger of the same fate,—it is so tempting!—but, so much the worse,—wit is often its own worst enemy.
Some anatomists, it is said, have, during the operation of dissection, caught from the subject the disease. I feel myself in danger at this moment,—a secret horror thrills through my veins. Often have I remarked that persons who undergo certain transformations are unconscious of the commencement and progress in themselves, though quicksighted, when their enemies, friends, or neighbours, are beginning to turn into bores. Husband and wife,—no creatures sooner!—perceive each other’s metamorphoses,—not Baucis and Philemon more surely, seldom like them before the transformation be complete. Are we in time to say the last adieu!
I feel that I am—I fear that I have long been,