 an
accurate report of it; and even the inappreciative lips of a very young lady
transmitting the word could not damp the impression of its weighty truthfulness.
It was perfect! Adulation of the young Sir Willoughby's beauty and wit, and
aristocratic bearing and mien, and of his moral virtues, was common: welcome if
you like, as a form of homage; but common, almost vulgar, beside Mrs.
Mountstuart's quiet little touch of nature. In seeming to say infinitely less
than others, as Miss Isabel Patterne pointed out to Lady Busshe, Mrs.
Mountstuart comprised all that the others had said, by showing the needlessness
of allusions to the saliently evident. She was the aristocrat reproving the
provincial. »He is everything you have had the goodness to remark, ladies and
dear sirs, he talks charmingly, dances divinely, rides with the air of a
commander-in-chief, has the most natural grand pose possible without ceasing for
a moment to be the young English gentleman he is. Alcibiades, fresh from a Louis
IV. perruquier, could not surpass him: whatever you please; I could outdo you in
sublime comparisons, were I minded to pelt him. Have you noticed that he has a
leg?«
    So might it be amplified. A simple-seeming word of this import is the
triumph of the spiritual, and where it passes for coin of value, the society has
reached a high refinement: Arcadian by the æsthetic route. Observation of
Willoughby was not, as Miss Eleanor Patterne pointed out to Lady Culmer, drawn
down to the leg, but directed to estimate him from the leg upward. That,
however, is prosaic. Dwell a short space on Mrs. Mountstuart's word; and
whither, into what fair region, and with how decorously voluptuous a sensation,
do not we fly, who have, through mournful veneration of the Martyr Charles, a
coy attachment to the Court of his Merrie Son, where the leg was ribanded with
love-knots and reigned. Oh! it was a naughty Court. Yet have we dreamed of it as
the period when an English cavalier was grace incarnate; far from the boor now
hustling us in another sphere; beautifully mannered, every gesture dulcet. And
if the ladies were ... we will hope they have been traduced. But if they were,
if they were too tender, ah! gentlemen were gentlemen then - worth perishing
for! There is this dream in the English country; and it must be an aspiration
after some form of melodious gentlemanliness which is imagined to have inhabited
the island at
