dark hair à la Grecque; and you have a light step and a quick speech, and just sufficient embonpoint to recall our young sonnetteers from their dreams of Dryads and of Naiads, and to compel them to muse for a few minutes on something more lovely and less divine. And you paint flowers, and draw caricatures, and you play the harp and l'écarté, and sing delightfully; and you love Handel, and dote upon Shakspeare: and you are twenty-five, and 'Mary!'
By all these signs you are manifestly pointed out as the idol before whom we are to prostrate our hearts and our papers. You will not refuse the homage we proffer. Among our gay and buoyant souls the day of chivalry and of enthusiasm shall have another morning: you shall be to us the queen of the joust; in your sight the bold and adventurous are to break their first lance; your smile is to be the excitement, your hand is to bestow the reward; a thousand poets shall be your slaves, a thousand quills shall leap from their desks to avenge the look that threatens you with insult. Your image shall animate, and your name shall protect us; censure shall kneel before you, and criticism shall be dumb in your presence.
We are your ladyship's very humble servants,
Marmaduke Villars, Davenant Cecil, Tristram Merton, Irvine Montagu, Gerard Montgomery, Henry Baldwin, Joseph Haller, Peter Ellis, Paterson Aymer, Eustace Heron, Edward Haselfoot, William Payne, Archibald Frazer, Hamilton Murray, Charles Pendragon, Lewis Willoughby, John Tell, Edmund Bruce, Reginald Holyoake, Richard Mills, Oliver Medley, Peregrine Courtenay, Vyvyan Joyeuse, Martin Lovell, Martin Danvers Heaviside, &c. &c. &c.
"This will never do, Marmaduke," said her Ladyship.
"It will do very well, please your Ladyship," said the foremost of the group.
"It is some mad prank of my mad brother's contrivance: prythee, Frederic, come hither, and if it is in your nature to be grave for two minutes together, unravel to us this mystery."
"By your Ladyship's shoe-tye," said Frederic, with a mock reverence, and a voice of imperturbable gravity, "it were presumption in me to read Arabic, or to understand wit. Howbeit, if your Ladyship will take your state, and assemble around you your privy council of beauty and fashion, I will
