LETTER XCIII. MRS KNOWLES. Feb. 23, 1790. My dear friend, your kind letter of November 27th reached me not till the second week in January. The box of Mr Rowley's, in which it travelled, was kept unopened so long. Charming as are its contents, they were fortunately not any of them complexioned for the necessity of early comment. My beloved Mrs Knowles's letters are of all, all hours, unlike those epistolary volatiles, whose spirit evaporates as events grow stale, and popular topics change their ground. Wit, eloquence, philosophy, "These themselves do far advance Above the power of time and space; They scorn such outward circumstance, Their time's for ever; everywhere their place." My heart thanks the friendly premonition with which your letter opens. It is about my taking exercise. You were, from experience, too well justified in concluding, that it would probably be fruitless; but the studious, or social sedentariness, for it is equally disposed to be either, so certainly natural to me, was, last summer, startled into peripatetic exertion, by oppressed respiration. Since that period, I have walked generally an hour in a day, as round a pace as my strength will permit, in the Dean's Walk, "when chill blustering winds, or driving rain, prevent not my willing feet"-no, I cannot quite say that, my stimulated feet-to pace their vowed mile upon the gravel. When they do prevent them, I remember your injunction in a long past letter, to tear along the gallery, clawing, like a wild cat, at the windows. There is no boasting that the whimsical portrait entirely suits me. However, along the gallery I do pace to and fro, though rather more like a tame than a wild cat; and I often make noise enough to rival cats, even in their moments of cruel love. In the conviction, that my lungs, as well as my limbs, require exercise, when I walk in the gallery, I close the end doors, and repeat long passages from our poets, aloud, the metrical treasures of my early years, or resume the pleasing labour of the memory, which continues to accumulate them. Social engagements, or household attentions, engrossing so perpetually the later hours of the day, I am obliged to subtract this earlier one from the leisure I used to devote to my absent friends, and to now and then admitting "the Ladies of the Mountain." Those who love me will consent to a longer interval between my letters, for my health's sake; and as to the "yellow hair'd god, and his nine fusty maids," I make no scruple to slap the gallery door in their faces, when they approach me with extended pen. And now, ere you fall quite asleep over my egotisms, let me endeavour to wave them, and follow the course of your last letter, when, springing from my shoulders, after having muttered kind warnings in my ear, it stretches its strong pinion, and soars into brighter tracks. Admirably do you moralize upon the enamoured daring of the fair apostate, as you seen to consider her; but she is not considered here as having absolutely apostatized. As a daughter of the church, I might be reproached with using that word, yet I scruple not its use, as applied to one, who, educated in a strict self-denying system, suffers the voice of love to turn her mind into laxer principles. She is very retired, makes no new intimacies in our little city, and plays no cards. It seems she was addressed some few years back, by a gentleman of your persuasion, Mr Zachary, of benevolent character, with an affluent fortune, living in a little Eden of his own. Whether the fair Favoretta liked not the thoughts of a mutilated husband,—for you know the accident which deprived him of a limb,—or whatever else was her objection, she proved, fortunately for a frank-hearted, pleasant friend of mine, cruel. You know Mrs S., she has two twin sisters, short low-browed nymphs, that wore their dark hair in reverse curls upon their naturally unlofty foreheads, long before any body else so wore it. Thence Sophia and I used to call them the little bull-calves. On a late visit to her sister, one of these dear little bullys buts her curled pate into Mr -'s heart, and last September, got into nice matrimonial pasture in his blooming and fruitful fields. I must, however, observe, that the nymph is vastly polished and improved since the days in which she and her sister obtained the above playful appellation, given not in spleen, but jocularity. She passed a month with me in the close of last autumn. I found her sensible, ingenious, and affectionate. Though fashion has now bullified us all, yet the poke, and a certain scowl over the brow, and a kind of bounce-about gait, makes her retain a little of her sometime resemblance. There is about her no dearth of Babylonianisms, the smart cap, the high feather, the ball, the play, and the song, are constitutionally dear; -- yet, as she has sense and affections, I think she will domesticate, especially if she should be fruitful, as her sisters have proved, whose olive branches rise swiftly around their board; for the twin-bully has been three or four years in the matrimonial herd, on the fat meads of Yorkshire, literally led thither by a tolerably wealthy gentleman farmer and grazier. To return to the bride of Mr She was, on her visit to me last year, more interesting by the effects of love, sickened and shadowed over by doubtful hope; Mr had not then declared himself. Her small fortune, and, yet more, her religion against her ;-but luck has been a lord to Charlotte. Favoretta is gentle, her emperor energetic. Mr Z. they tell me, is mild, and Charlotte is high-spirited. Probably, therefore, the former will lead his wife, the latter her husband into the bosom of mother church. If their consciences do not twinge them when they get there, it may be all very well. Bigotry, in every persuasion, recedes fast from the human mind. And now we will dismiss Mrs Z. in whose happiness my heart rejoices, though my pen has been so impertinently saucy over her figure, which, in spite of a little bullism, is not void of attractions, since, B b VOL. II. |