parks, or commented upon in drawing-rooms consigned to silence and brown holland. No, her grandeur and her charity, her ambition and her indiscretion, her appearances, which resembled other apparitions, as being "unreal mockeries," and her realities, which were noun-substantive inflictions, to be seen, felt, heard, and understood, were told and talked over in the back parlour of the grocer, and the counting-house of the coal merchant. The result was, a determination, on the part of both these worthies, to be "blarneyed by my Lady Anne no longer, since a woman who goes to outshine her betters, and to give in charity what she owes in justice, cannot be any great shakes, though she might be a born lady."
So said Mrs. Plumpound, and so said the seller of black diamonds; and let those who sneer at their vulgarity remember, that derision is not argument, nor ridicule the test of truth. No form of words, however poetic, eloquent, droll, or epigrammatic, can warp, elongate, or contract, the straight lines of simple integrity. It has been said, "that honesty is the virtue of a footman;" and so it is; but not the less ought it to be that of his master, and of every other human being.*[1] Whenever the obligations of society
- ↑ * Ages hence, when all lesser records of wars and tumults, parties and bickerings, have ceased, that glorious, imperishable, and affecting annal, will remain of Queen Victoria, who, when still very young, and quite unable to remember her father, honourably paid all his debts, and those of her mother also. Whe-
