Abbess. Very proper: to the sisters 'Twould be wrong to chatter thus; Now and then, when snug and cosey, 'Twill do very well for us. It is strange how tittle-tattle All about the convent spreads, When the barber from the village Comes to shave the sisters' heads.
Duchess. Do you really mean to tell me I must lose my raven locks? Then I'll tie 'em up with ribbon, And I'll keep 'em in my box: Oh! how Louis used to praise 'em! Hem!—I think I'll go to bed.— Not another drop, I thank you,— It would get into my head.
Abbess. Benedicite! my daughter, You'll be soon used to the place; Though at meals our only duchess, You will have to say your grace: And when none can interrupt us, You of courtly scenes shall tell, When I bring a drop of comfort From my cellar to my cell!
EDWARD SAVILLE.
A TRANSCRIPT. BY CHARLES WHITEHEAD.
The doctor tells me I must take no wine. Pshaw! It is not that which mounts into my brain; and sometimes—but I must not wander—wine is the best corrector of these fancies. One bottle more of sober claret, and I shall be able to finish before midnight the brief sketch of my life which I promised Travers long ago.
It were worse than useless to set down any particulars of my boyhood. An only son is usually a spoiled one, and that which is so easy and delightful a task to most parents was by no means difficult or unpleasant to mine; and yet, to do myself justice, I believe I was not more conceited, insolent, selfish, and rapacious than others are during those days of innocence, as they are called,—those days of innocence which form the germ of that noble and disinterested creature, man.
At the age of three-and-twenty I succeeded to my father's estate. It was to divert a sense of loneliness which beset me, that I plunged into—as they term it, but the phrase is a wrong one—that I ventured upon the course of folly and dissipation into which so many young men of fortune like myself hurry themselves, or are led, or are driven. But why recount these scenes of pleasure—so called, or miscalled—whose reaction is utter weariness, satiety, and disgust?
I was at the theatre one night, when the friend who accompanied me directed my attention to a very lovely girl, who, with her mother and a party of friends, occupied the next box. She was, certainly, the loveliest creature my eyes had ever lighted upon; with a sylph-like form, (that is the usual phrase, I believe,) wanting perhaps that complete roundness of limb which is considered essential to perfect beauty in a woman—but she was barely sixteen—and yet suggesting, too, the idea of consummate symmetry. Her face—but who can describe beauty? who even can paint it? Let any man look at the finest attempts to achieve this impossibility by the old masters, and then let him compare them with the faces he has seen, and may see every day. Heavens! what inanities! Can a man paint a soul upon canvass? And yet the artist talks of his "expression."