his private room, meditating a letter to the “Times” on the shortcomings of the hotel, Paterfamilias, armed with a gigantic white bow, perspires to and fro, as a master of the ceremonies, forms the sets in the Lancers, hunts up, and captures the shirking waltzer in the remotest corner of the room. Manchester and Leeds go up and down the country-dance hand-in-hand with Wimpole Street and Tavistock Square. Young Ireland is here in force, and in the demeanour of its representatives there are certainly no traces of an oppressed nationality. People actually talk to people whom they have never seen before and may never see again, and that without any sense of wounded dignity, any forboding of being bound at some future period by this fleeting intimacy. I say that it is pleasant to see Britons enjoying themselves in this continental fashion, and that the unusual spectacle is cheaply purchased, even at the expense of brushing one’s own tail-coat, and polishing one’s own patent-leather boots—processes with which the succession of festivities here has rendered me by degrees exceedingly familiar. Let any one who doubts the truth of these remarks go for a trip next year to Sulphurwell.
Of course every medal has its reverse. And I sometimes wonder if all this be enjoyment in the continental fashion whether certain other features of Sulphurwell society are continental likewise. Do Ems, and Hamburg, and Saratoga contain types of female character such as my friends, Mrs. White, Mrs. Black, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, and a score of others whom I could name? Of these ladies scarcely any have marriageable daughters. They are most of them provided with husbands, and nearly all with false fronts. They don’t drink the waters. What in the world do they come here, year after year, to do? They come here, I think, to observe and to invent; and to charm listening circles with the mixed fiction and fact. They are the oral, historical novelists of those who don’t read books or subscribe to the circulating library, as the minstrels in an unlettered age were the earliest poets. They can even improvise as they go on, like the Italians. Before you have been a week in the house your past and present—nay, your future life is all patent to these terrible sorceresses. I imagine that they must travel about with Burke’s “Landed Gentry and Commoners” (the peerage we have, of course, at the hotel), Boyle’s “Court Guide,” all the local directories and county histories, perhaps all the back numbers of the “Times” following them in a waggon. How else can they acquire their stupendous knowledge? If, in the wild exuberance of youth and the year ’37, you chanced to wrench off a knocker, and were fined by the late Mr. Ballantine, Mrs. Black knows all about it. She knows that there are only a couple of consumptive lives between yourself and your uncle’s thirty thousand pounds, made by licensed-victualling. But their functions, as I have already said, are not limited to those of the simple historian. They know how everybody is engaged to everybody else,—Mr. Smith to Miss Brown; Mr. Brown to Miss Jones; how you yourself came down expressly to court Miss Robinson (you danced with her twice the first night—the fact is conclusive), how you proposed in the private sitting~room, and in pressing her lovely person and cherry-coloured dress (with the blue bows) to your heart, pricked the second joint of your middle finger with the pin of her turquoise and cornelian brooch, &c. &c. One is unavoidably reminded of the “postman coming round the corner with a double letter from Northamptonshire,” in the School for Scandal. Sheridan before writing that play must of necessity have come to Sulphurwell. Nowhere else is the article exhibited in the same condensed form. Novelists and play-wrights should come here to study it, as painters go to an exhibition, or agriculturists to a prize-show.
Then, another of our types, the Irishman, I mean the Thackerayan Irishman, will be found here in perfection. I wonder whether in any other race is to be found the same mixture of bombast and good-nature, impudence and arch humour, kingly descent and questionable linen? How openly they avow what every one else would do all in his power to conceal: how boldly they stalk in without knocking where the least timid of any other nation stands hesitating at the door. Miss X. the great Sheffield heiress, had not been above a fortnight at the George when seven Irish gentlemen revealed to me in the strictest confidence, and of course separately, that each one had proposed to, and been accepted by, her. Shortly afterwards Miss X. departed home, ignorant, as I am perfectly sure, of the polygamic engagements in which she had become involved: and my seven friends separated quite naturally and unconcernedly into groups, in quest of the persons and purses of Miss Y. and Miss Z. Perhaps one of the most remarkable features about these people is their mutual distrust of one another. “Dog won’t eat dog,” and it seems that one Irishman refuses to swallow another Irishman’s stories. Thus my right-hand neighbour at dinner is a descendant of Brian Boru, a near heir to a peerage, and (adds my left-hand neighbour) the son of a retired linen-draper at Wicklow. And, so the gentleman on my left is a first cousin, not only to the Duke of Leinster, but also to the postmaster at Enniscorthy.
But the Irishman, as exhibited at my favourite Sulphurwell, is an inexhaustible—some may perhaps think an exhausted—subject. Time fails me to speak of his better varieties, as also of other Sulphurwell types of character, scenes, incidents, adventures, and what not, which would swell into the size of a local hand-book. To know Sulphurwell thoroughly, you must go to Sulphurwell yourselves.
LA FILLE BIEN GARDÉE.
(AN INTERCEPTED LETTER.)
I want to know that you’re come back, and safe at Shirley Hall;
And till I get a note from yon, announcing that return,
I’ve neither head nor heart for Chitty, Sugden, Hayes, or Fearne.
I read it, Edith, at my window, smoking a cigar;
And I’m to work while you’re away?—a likely thing, indeed!
Yes, I’m in one Assizes case,—the one in Adam Bede.
