"Some did laugh,
And some did say, God bless us,"
—while I, like Macbeth—
"Could not say, Amen."
Meantime Kemble, peevish, as half-tipsy people generally are, and ill brooking the interference of the two peers, drew back, muttering and fumbling in his coat-pocket, evidently with some dire intent lowering in his eyes. To the amusement of all, and to my increased consternation, he drew forth a volume of the "Wild Irish Girl," (which he had brought to return to Lady C——k) and, reading, with his deep, emphatic voice, one of the most high-flown of its passages, he paused, and patting the page with his forefinger, with the look of Hamlet addressing Polonius, he said, "Little girl, why did you write such nonsense? And where did you get all these d—d hard words?"
Thus taken by surprise, and "smarting with my wounds" or mortified authorship, I answered, unwittingly and witlessly, the truth: "Sir, I wrote as well as I could, and I got the hard words out of Johnson's Dictionary."
The eloquence of Erskine himself would have pleaded my cause with less effect; and the "J'y allois" of La Fontaine was not quoted with more approbation in the circles of Paris, than the naïveté of my equally veracious and spontaneous reply. The triumph of my simplicity did not increase Kemble's good humour; and, shortly after, Mr. Spenser carried him off in his carriage, to prevent any further attacks on my unfortunate head—inside or out.
WOMAN.
There is no doubt that the proper study of mankind is WOMAN; and Mr. Pope was wrong; for the endless variety of character among the sex is of itself a mine, endless and inexhaustible; but to study them in their domestic capacity, is the sweetest of all—