little, chilly and frozen for a creature that has always been living among icebergs.  We are doomed to them for a week, Lord Rochdale having promised to stay so long; and he is one of those patterns of inconvenient precision, who, having once promised, will certainly pay the heavy debt of visitation to the uttermost minute.  Arlington is here—­brought expressly to play suitor, and looking affectingly conscious of his role.  Berwick, I believe, has told him that he shall die of disappointment, or, what is as bad, shut up his house, if he quits them unaccepted.  What an alternative for the poor youth—­to be forced to marry at one-and-twenty, or deprive the world of the fortunate master of the best cook in Christendom.

“There is a strange heterogeneous medley here.  Fancy, of all living creatures, the Bolsovers being brought hither to meet the Rochdales, whom they suit like point ruffles with a shooting-jacket.  Either Berwick has acquired a taste for contrasts, or, in assorting his party, has overlooked every thing but the prospective match, and drawn the rest of the company by lot.  His only other considerate arrangement is having Charles Theobald here to swain Lady Bolsover, and talk ‘Turf’ with her Lord.  This is one of Berwick’s ‘good-natured things.’  To do him justice, nobody knows better how to place chacun avec sa chacune; but it is a pity that in this case it contributes so little to the general amusement; for really Theobald’s intense flirtation with Lady Bolsover, is the flattest piece of dull indecorum that ever met my virtuous eyes.  They are dull, these people—­keep him from quadrupeds, and Theobald is a cipher; and Lady B. has little more than the few ideas which she gets sent over with her dresses from Paris.  I know it is mauvais ton to cry them down—­but I cannot help it.  My sincerity will ruin me some fine day.

“The Hartlands are here:  he talks parliament, and she talks strong sense, and tells every body how to do every thing, and seems to say, like Madame de Sevigne’s candid Frenchwoman, Il n’y a que moi qui ai toujours raison.  To close the list, we have that good-looking puppy, young Leighton, an underbred youth, spoiled by premature immersion in a dandy regiment, who goes about saying the same things to every body, and labouring to reward the inconsiderate benevolence of you soft-hearted patronesses, by talking as if London lay packed in Willis’s rooms, and nobody existed but on Wednesday nights.  Forgive my impertinence; you know how, in my heart, I revere your oligarchy.

“You will wonder how I amuse myself in the midst of this curious specimen of a social Macedoine—­quite well—­and am acquiring a taste for that true epicurean apathy which one enjoys in perfection, among people whom one expects neither to interest, nor to be interested by; and I sit down among them as calmly comfortable as I can conceive a growing cabbage to be in wet weather.  I hold my tongue and watch the chaos as gravely as I can, while Berwick labours to make the jarring elements of his party harmonize, and offends every one in turn by trying to talk to him in his own way.  I observe this generally irritates people; nobody likes to be so well understood.