Part 25

I spent a few months abroad. When I returned, he was married to the loveliest being of her sex, and had sent me fifty notes to inform me of the fact and beseech me to visit him at Volant Hall, with the requisite quantity of sympathy and congratulation. I went, and was introduced in form. Her father was a country clergyman, the proprietor of seven acres of glebe, five broken armchairs, and three hundred manuscript discourses; she had dark hair, black eyes, and a fond love of poetry; she danced like a wood-nymph, and her name was Mary.

He has lived since his marriage a very quiet life, rarely visiting the metropolis, and devoting his exertions most indefatigably to the comfort of his tenantry and the improvement of his estate. Volant Hall is deliciously situated in the best county in England. If you go thither, you must go prepared with the tone, or at least with the countenance, of approbation and wonder. He gives you, of course, mutton such as no other pasture fattens, and ale such as no other cellar brews. The stream that runs through his park supplies him with trout of unprecedented beauty and delicacy; and he could detect a partridge that had feasted in his woods amidst the bewildering confusion of a Lord Mayor’s banquet. You must look at his conservatory; no other was ever constructed on the same principle. You must handle his plough; he himself has obtained a patent for the invention. Everything, within doors and without, has wherewithal to attract and astonish; the melon and the magnolia, the stable and the dairy, the mounting of his mother’s spectacles and the music of his wife’s piano. He has few pictures, but they are the masterpieces of the best masters. He has only one statue, but he assures you that it is Canova’s _chef-d’œuvre_. The last time I was with him, he had a theme to descant upon which made his eloquence more than usually impassioned. An heir was just born to the Volant acres. An ox was roasted, and a barrel pierced in every meadow; the noise of fiddles was incessant for a week, and the expenditure of powder would have lasted a Lord High Admiral for a twelvemonth. It was allowed by all the county that there never was so sweet a child as little Adolphus.

Among his acquaintance, who have generally little toleration for any foibles but their own, Volant is pretty generally voted a bore.

“Of course our pinery is not like Mr. Volant’s,” says Lady Framboise; “he is prating from morning to night of his fires and flues. We have taken some pains, and we pay a ruinous sum to our gardener, but we never talk about it.”

“The deuce take that fellow Volant,” says Mr. Crayon, “does he fancy no one has a Correggio but himself? I have one that cost me two thousand guineas, and I would not part with it for double the sum; but I never talk about it.”

“That boy Volant,” says old Sir Andrew Chalkstone, “is so delighted to find himself the father of another boy, that, by Jove, he can speak of nothing else. Νow I have a little thing in a cradle, too; a fine boy, they tell me, and vastly like his father, but I never talk about it.”

Well, well! let a man be obliging to his neighbours, and merciful to his tenants, an upright citizen and an affectionate friend, and there is one judge who will not condemn him for having “the best bat in the school!”

PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. LONDON AND EDINBURGH

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Maccabees, ch. i.

[2] We might have added stage managers. Their genius for the Bathos Precipitate is frequently displayed in notices of the following kind:--

“Monday, January 7.

“The new drama, entitled ----, has been received with uninterrupted bursts of applause, and will be repeated every evening till farther notice.”

“Tuesday, January 8.

“In obedience to the wishes of the public, the new drama, entitled ----, is withdrawn.”

[3] Sir Francis Wentworth points our quotation thus:

Sic nos servavit A--Poll--Ο!--HΟR.

[4] Every one knows the gradations of vis, visit, and visitation; _vis inertiæ_, therefore, signifies an idle visit.

[5] _Stipula._ Hence the term stipulation.

[6] The ceremony was rarely, if ever, used in the reign of Tiberius.

[7] This was the customary response, signifying, “Where you are the master I shall be mistress.”

[8] The greater part of the satire here alluded to was retrenched in our Second Edition.

[9] In Petty Cury, Cambridge.

[10] Pattison.

[11] Bulwer--afterwards Lord Lytton.

[12] Stapleton.

[13] Ryland of St. John’s.

[14] Macaulay.

[15] Ord.

[16] Praed.

[17] Charles Austin.

[18] Churchill.

[19] Moore.

[20] Prosser.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

have writtten a farce=> have written a farce {pg 39}

Susan sung us some simple=> Susan sang us some simple {pg 53}

Ammon to ussume the quart-pot=> Ammon to assume the quart-pot {pg 66}