Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/34

up two flights of stairs in East Street. She entertained her guests with tea, coffee, macaroons, and "much love." She talked to them, or rather at them, upon purely literary topics,—as, for example, Miss Hannah More's "Strictures on Female Education," which they had never read. She addressed Mary Lamb in French,—"possibly having heard that neither Mary nor I understood French,"—and she favoured them with Miss Seward's opinion of Pope. She asked Lamb, who was growing more miserable every minute, if he agreed with D'Israeli as to the influence of organism upon intellect; and when he tried to parry the question with a pun upon organ—"which went off very flat"—she despised him for his feeble flippancy. She advised Mary to carry home two translations of "Pizarro," so that she might compare them verbatim (an offer hastily declined), and she made them both promise to return the following week—which they never did—to meet Miss Jane Porter and her sister, "who, it seems, have heard much of Mr. Coleridge, and wish to meet us because we are his friends." It is a comédie larmoyante. We sympathize hotly with Lamb