"That's right! You've heard of the new poet then? Tremendous they say; equal to Shakspeare—quite a great man."
"Indeed! Oh, how I long to see him!"
"Well, perhaps you may one of these days. Bristles—my friend Bristles of the Universal-says he's a perfect—what do they call that pretty street in Southampton?—Paragon—a perfect paragon, Bristles says: I'll ask him to dinner some day."
"What day?—Oh, let it be soon, dear papa!"
"There's a dear delightful enthusiastic girl! We ought to encourage people of genius. Curious we never heard of him before, for he was our neighbour, I hear, in Finsbury; but poor, I suppose, and did not mix with our set even then."
Mr Pitskiver looked at the opposite side of the street while he spoke, as if to assure himself that he was in a still higher altitude above the poet now than some few years before. But, as if feeling called on to show his increased superiority by greater condescension, he said, as he walked out of the room, "I shall certainly have him to dinner, and Bristles, and some more men of talent to meet him—
'The feast of reason, and the flow of soul!'"
the only quotation, by the way, in which Mr Pitskiver was ever known to indulge.
CHAPTER III.
Miss Hendy had formerly kept a school, and her portrait would have done very well for a frontispiece to Mrs Trimmer. She was what is called prim in her manner, and as delicate as an American. She always called the legs of a table its props—for the word legs was highly unfeminine. She admired talent, and gave it vast quantities of tea and toast. Her drawing-room was a temple of the Muses, and only open to those who were bountifully endowed with the gifts of nature or of fortune; for she considered it a great part of her duty to act as a kind of link between Plutus and Minerva. In the effort to discover objects worthy of her recommendation, she was mainly aided by the celebrated Mr Bristles. Every month whole troops of Herschels and Wordsworths, and Humes and Gibbons, were presented to her by the great critic; and with a devout faith in all he told her, she listened enraptured to the praises of those astonishing geniuses, till she had begun to enter into Mr Bristles's own feelings of contempt for every body except the favoured few. And to-night was the grand debut of a more remarkable phenomenon than any of the others. A youth of twenty-three, tall, modest, intellectual, and long-haired—in short, the "Ticket"—was to read the opening of a tragedy; and sculptors, painters, mechanicians, and city Croesuses, were invited to be present at the display. Among these last shone our friend Mr Pitskiver, radiant in white waistcoat and gold chains, two rings on each finger, and a cameo the size of a cheese-cake on his neckcloth. The other critic, in right of his account at the bank, was a tall silent gentleman, a wood-merchant from the Boro', who nodded his head in an oracular manner when any thing was said above his comprehension; and who was a patron of rising talent, on the same enlightened principles as his friend Mr Pitskiver. Mr Whalley also showed his patronage in the same economical manner as the other, and expected immortality at the expense of a few roasts of beef and bottles of new wine.