An affected giggle won't pass muster for a hearty laugh—superficial boarding-school "finishing" is not education, for bad spelling will show, though the pen be held by jewelled fingers—and bad French, bad Italian, and worse English, are miserable substitutes for conversation, though uttered by the fairest lips that ever lisped in fashionable drawl.
It is true that in the circle of my limited acquaintance I have the honor to number some ladies whose unaffected manners, natural grace, and true politeness place even my usual awkwardness at perfect ease, while their superior intelligence causes me to feel most deeply my extensive non-acquirements—but to every one of these I have met twenty who, although they could dance, sing, play the piano; paint on velvet, or work in worsted, flowers unknown in botany, and animals to which ordinary natural historians are strangers; couldn't write an intelligible English note, or read anything more difficult than easy words in two syllables; and if told that wheat bread is made out of kidney potatoes wouldn't know the difference.
I repudiate all this tribe of diluted milk-and-water misses, and should I ever feel matrimonially inclined shall commission some country friend to choose me a wife who can darn stockings, and make pumpkin pies anyhow, and hoe and chop cord-wood, if in any case the subscriber shouldn't be able to meet current family expenses.
XXII.
Cupid in Cold Weather.—Valentine's Day.
In accordance with some heathen custom, the origin of which is unknown to moderns, a certain day is selected in the year, when people send hosts of anonymous letters to other people, generally supposed to be on the subject of love, but which are not unfrequently missives containing angry, malicious, or insulting allusions. This is a day to rejoice the hearts of the penny postmen, who always get their money before they give up the documents. This glorious day is, as most people are aware, the fourteenth of February—time when young ladies expect to receive sentimental poetry by the cord, done up in scented envelopes, written upon gilt-edged paper, and blazoned round with cupids, hearts, darts, bows and arrows, torches, flames, birds, flowers, and all the other paraphernalia of those before-folks-laughed-at-but-in-private-learned-by-heart epistles known as "Valentines."
A time when young gentlemen let off their excess of love by lack-a-daisical missives to their chosen fair; praising in anonymous verses their to-other-eyes-undiscoverable-but-to-their-vision -brilliantly-resplendent charms—poetizing red hair into "auburn ringlets,"—making skim-milk-colored eyes, "orbs, the hue of heaven's own blue,"—causing scraggy, freckled necks to become "fair and graceful as Juno's swans," and deifying squat, dumpy young ladies into "first-rate angels."
A time when innumerable people take unauthorised liberties with the name of a venerable Roman, long since defunct, laying themselves under all sorts of obligations, payable in friendship,—pledging any amount of love, and running up tremendous bills of affections, making no solid man responsible therefor, but only signing the all-over-christendom-once-a-year-universally-forged cognomen "Valentine."
Most of these communications are amatory, some sickish, some nauseating, some satirical, some caustic, some abusive; for it seems to be a time which many a man takes advantage of to revenge some fancied slight from scornful lady, by sending her one of those scandalous nuisances, misnamed "comic Valentines;" because he thinks there will be so many of the foul birds upon the wing that his own carrion fledgling cannot be traced to its filthy nest.
Bull Dogge, who is looking over my shoulder, remarks, that the man who would insult a lady, by sending an anonymous letter, would steal the pennies from a blind man, and then coax his dog away to sell to the butcher boys.