Four o’clock strikes. The company are all but gone, and the musicians “put up” with their absence. A few “figures,” however, remain, that have never been danced, and the hostess, who is all urbanity and turbanity, kindly hopes that they will stand up for “one set more.” The six figures jump at the offer; they “wake the Harp,” get the fiddlers into a fresh scrape, and “the Lancers” are put through their exercise. This may be called the Dance of Death, for it ends every thing. The band is disbanded, and the Ball takes the form of a family circle. It is long past the time when church-yards yawn, but the mouth of Mamma opens to a bore, that gives hopes of the Thames Tunnel. Papa, to whom the Ball has been anything but a force-meat one, seizes eagerly upon the first eatables he can catch, and with his mouth open and his eyes shut, declares, in the spirit of an “Examiner” into such things, that a “Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few.” The son, heartily tired of a suit of broad cloth cut narrow, assents to the proposition, and having no further use for his curled head, lays it quietly on the shelf. The daughter droops; art has had her Almack’s, and nature establishes a Free and Easy. Grace throws herself, skow-wow any-how, on an ottoman, and Good Breeding crosses her legs. Roses begin to relax, and Curls to unbend themselves; the very Candles seem released from the restraints of gentility, and getting low, some begin to smoke, while others indulge in a gutter. Muscles and sinews feel equally let loose, and by way of a joke, the cramp ties a double-knot in Clarinda’s calf.
Clarinda screams. To this appeal the maternal heart is more awake than the maternal eyes, and the maternal hand begins hastily to bestow its friction, not on the leg of suffering, but on the leg of the sofa. In the mean time, paternal hunger gets satisfied; he eats slower, and sleeps faster, subsiding, like a gorged Boa Constrictor, into torpidity; and in this state, grasping an extinguished candle, he lights himself up to bed. Clarinda follows, stumbling through her steps in a doze-à-doze; the brother is next, and Mamma having seen with half an eye, or something less, that all is safe, winds up the procession.
Every Ball, however, has its rebound, and so has this in their dreams—with the mother who has a daughter, as a Golden Ball; with the daughter, who has a lover, as an eye-ball; with his son, who has a rival, as a pistol-ball; but with the father, who has no dreams at all, as nothing but the blacking-ball of oblivion.
LITERARY AND LITERAL.
THE March of Mind upon its mighty stilts,
(A spirit by no means to fasten mocks on,)
In travelling through Berks, Beds, Notts, and Wilts, Hants—Bucks, Herts, Oxon,
Got up a thing our ancestors ne’er thought on,
A thing that, only in our proper youth,