MEETING OF THE BLUES

At a House" where nothing but CONVERSATION is spoke."

MARY and her aunt Grizzy were received by Mrs. Bluemits with that air of condescension which great souls practice towards ordinary mortals, and which is intended, at one and the same time, to encourage and to repel; to show the extent of their goodness, even while they make, or try to make, their protégé feel the immeasurable distance which nature or fortune has placed between them. It was with this air of patronising grandeur that Mrs. Bluemits took her guests by the hand, and introduced them to a circle of females already assembled.

Mrs. Bluemits was not an avowed authoress; but she was a professed critic, a well informed woman, a woman of great conversational powers, &c. and, to use her own phrase, nothing but conversation was spoke in her house. Her guests were therefore always expected to be distinguished, either for some literary production, or their taste in the belles lettres. Two ladies from Scotland, the land of poetry and romance, were consequently hailed as new stars in Mrs. Bluemit's horizon. No sooner were they seated, than Mrs. Bluemits began: As I am a friend to ease in literary society, we shall, without ceremony, resume our conversation; for, as Seneca observes, the comfort of life depends upon conversation.'

I think,' said Miss Graves, it is Rochefoucault who says the great art of conversation is to hear patiently and answer precisely.'

A very poor definition, for so profound a philosopher, remarked Mrs. Apsley.

The amiable author of what the gigantic Johnson styles the melancholy and angry Night Thoughts, gives a nobler, a more elevated, and, in my humble opinion, a juster explication of the intercourse of mind,' said Miss Parkins: and she repeated the following lines, with pompous enthusiasm:

"Speech ventilates our intellectual fire,
Speech burnishes our mental magazine,
Brightens for ornament and whets for use.
What numbers, sheath'd in erudition, lie
Plung'd to the hilts in venerable tomes

And rusted in, who might have borne an edge
And play'd a sprightly beam, it born to speech-
If born blest heirs of half their mother's tongue!"

Mrs. Bluemits proceeded;

"Tis thought's exchange, which, like the alternate push
Of waves conflicting, breaks the learned scum,
And defaces the student's standing pool.' '

The sensitive poet of Olney, if I mistake not,' said Mrs. Dalton, steers a middle course betwixt the somewhat bald maxim of the Parisian philosopher, and the mournful pruriency of the Bard of Night, when he

says,

"Conversation in its better part

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May be esteem'd a gift and not an art."' Mary had been accustomed to read, and to reflect upon what she read, and to apply it to the purpose for which it is valuable, viz. in enlarging her mind and cultivating her taste; but she had never been accustomed to prate, or quote, or sit down for the express purpose of displaying her acquirements; and she began. to tremble at hearing authors' names familiar in their mouths as household words;' but Grizzy, strong in ignorance, was nowise daunted. True, she heard what she could not comprehend, but she thought she would soon make things clear; and she therefore turned to her neighbour on her right hand and accosted her with My niece and I are just come from dining at Mrs. Pullens'-I daresay you have heard of her-she was Miss Flora M'Fuss; her father, Mr. M.Fuss, was a most excellent preacher, and she is a remarkable clever woman.'

Pray Ma'am has she come out, or is she simply bel esprit? inquired the lady.

Grizzy was rather at a loss; and, indeed, to answer a question put in an unknown language, would puzzle wiser brains than hers; but Grizzy was accustomed to converse, without being able to comprehend, and she therefore went on.

Her mother Mrs. M'Fuss-but she is dead-was a very clever woman too; I'm sure, I declare, I don't know whether the Doctor or her was the cleverest, but many people, I know, thinks Mrs. Pullens beats them both.'

Indeed! may I ask in what department she chiefly excels ?'

OI really think in every thing. For one thing, every thing in her house is done by steam; and then she can keep every thing, I can't tell how long, just in paper bags and bottles; and she is going to publish a book with all her receipts in it. I'm sure it will be very interesting.'

I beg ten thousand pardons for the interruption,' cried Mrs. Bluemits, from the opposite side of the room; but my ear was smote with the sounds of publish and interesting-words which never fail to awaken a responsive chord in my bosom. Pray,' addressing Grizzy, and bringing her into the full blaze of observation, may I ask was it of the Campbell those electric words were spoken? To you, Madam, I am sure I need not apologize for my enthusiasm-you who claim the proud distinction of being a country-woman, need I add-an acquaintance?'

All that poor Grizzy could comprehend of this harangue was, that it was reckoned a great honour to be acquainted with a Campbell; and chuckling with delight at the idea of her own consequence, she briskly replied

⚫O, I know plenty of Campbells; there's the Campbells of Mireside, relations of ours; and there's the

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Or perhaps,' said Miss Crick,' Miss Douglas prefers nature in its simplest, homeliest form; pray Ma'am,' turning full upon the now bewildered Grizzy, are you an admirer of Crabbe's Tales ?' Crabs' tails!' repeated Grizzy in astonishment, I don't think ever I tasted them-Indeed I don't think our crabs have tails; but I'm very fond of crabs' claws when there's any thing in them.' Fortunately the confusion of tongues was at this moment so great, that Grizzy's lapsus passed unnoticed by all but Mary, whose ears tingled at every word she uttered."

Without either a possibility or a perhaps,' said Mrs. Apsley, the probability is, Miss Douglas prefers the anthor of the Giaour to all the rest of her poetical countrymen. Where, in either Walter Scott or Thomas Campbell, will you find such lines as these? "Wet with their own best blood shall drip The gnashing tooth and haggard lip!"'

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Pardon me, Madam,' said Miss Parkins; but I am of opinion you have scarcely given a fair specimen of the powers of the Noble Bard in question. The image here represented is a familiar one; "the gnashing tooth and haggard lip," we have all witnessed, perhaps some of us may even have experienced. There is consequently little merit in presenting it to the mind's eye. It is easy, comparatively speaking, to portray the feelings and passions of our own kind. We have only, as Dryden expresses it, to descend into ourselves, to find the secret imperfections of our mind. It is therefore in his portraiture of the canine race, that the illustrious author has so far excelled all his contemporaries in fact he has given quite a dramatic cast to his dogs;' and she repeated with an air of triumph

"And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall,
Hold o'er the dead their carnival ;

Gorgling and growling o'er carcase and limb,
They were too busy to bark at him!

From a Tartar's skull they had stripped the flesh,

As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh ;

And their white tusks crunched o'er the whiter skull,
As it slipped through their jaws when their edge grew dull;
As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead,
When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed"

Now, to enter into the conceptions of a dog-to embody one's self, as it were, in the person of a brute -to sympathize in its feelings--to make its propensities our own---to "lazily mumble the bones of the dead" with our own individual" white tusks!"---pardon me, Madam, but with all due deference to the genius of Scott, it is a thing he has not dared to attempt. Only the finest mind in the universe was capable of taking so bold a flight. Scott's dogs, Madam, are tame do

mestic animals--mere human dogs, if I may say so. Byron's dogs-But let them speak for themselves! "The scalps were in the wild dog's maw, The hair was tangled round his jaw."

Show me, if you can, such an image in Scott?'

Very fine, certainly!' was here uttered by five novices, who were only there as probationers, consequently not privileged to go beyond a response.

Is it the dancing dogs they are speaking about?' asked Grizzy. But looks of silent contempt were the only replies she received.

I trust I shall not be esteemed presumptuous,' said Miss Entick, or supposed capable of entertaining views of detracting from the merits of the noble Author at present under discussion, if I humbly, but firmly, enter my caveat against the word "crunch," as constituting an innovation in our language, the purity of which cannot be too strictly preserved, or pointedly enforced. I am aware that by some I may be deemed unnecessarily fastidious; and possibly Christina, Queen of Sweden, might have applied to me the celebrated observation, said to have been elicited from her by the famed work of the laborious French Lexicographer, viz. that he was the most troublesome person in the world, for he required of every word to produce its passport, and to declare whence it came, and whither it was going. I confess, I too, for the sake of my country, would wish that every word we utter might be compelled to show its passport, attested by our great lawgiver, Dr. Samuel Johnson.'

Unquestionably,' said Mrs. Bluemits, purity of language ought to be preserved inviolate at any price; and it is more especially incumbent upon those who exercise a sway over our minds—those who are, as it were, the moulds in which our young imaginations are formed, to be watchful guardians of our language. But I lament to say, that in fact it is not so ;-and that the aberrations of our vernacular tongue have proceeded solely from the licentious use made of it by those whom we are taught to reverence as the fathers of the Sock and Lyre.'

Yet in familiar colloquy, I do not greatly object to the use of a word occasionally, even although unsanctioned by the authority of our mighty Lexicographer,' said a new speaker.

For my part,' said Miss Parkins,' a genius fettered by rules, always reminds me of Gulliver in the hairy bonds of the Lilliputians; and the sentiment of the elegant and enlightened Bard of Twickenham, is also mine:

"Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend,
And rise to faults true critics dare not mend :
From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part.
And snatch a grace beyond the reach of Art.”

So it is with the subject of our argument: a tamer genius than the illustrious Byron would not have dared to" crunch" the bone. But where in the whole compass of the English language will you find a word capable of conveying the same idea ?'

Pick,' modestly suggested one of the novices in a low key, hoping to gain some celebrity by this her first effort; but this dawn of intellect passed unnoticed.

The argument was now beginning to run high; parties were evidently forming of crunchers and anti