Falkland | Page 9

handed down to us by the barbarism of antiquity. We reason from what
even in old tunes was dubious, as if we were adducing what was certain
in those in which we live. And thus we have made no sanction to
abuses so powerful as history, and no enemy to the present like the
past.

FROM THE LADY EMILY MANDEVILLE TO MRS. ST. JOHN.
At last, my dear Julia, I am settled in my beautiful retreat. Mrs. Dalton
and Lady Margaret Leslie are all whom I could prevail upon to
accompany me. Mr. Mandeville is full of the corn-laws. He is chosen

chairman to a select committee in the House. He is murmuring
agricultural distresses in his sleep; and when I asked him occasionally
to come down here to see me, he started from a reverie, and
exclaimed-- "--Never, Mr. Speaker, as a landed proprietor; never will I
consent to my own ruin."
My boy, my own, my beautiful companion, is with me. I wish you
could see how fast he can run, and how sensibly he can talk. "What a
fine figure he has for his age!" said I to Mr. Mandeville the other day.
"Figure! age!" said his father; "in the House of Commons he shall make
a figure to every age." I know that in writing to you, you will not be
contented if I do not say a great deal about myself. I shall therefore
proceed to tell you, that I feel already much better from the air and
exercise! the journey, from the conversation of my two guests, and,
above all, from the constant society of my dear boy. He was three last
birthday. I think that at the age of twenty-one, I am the least childish of
the two. Pray remember me to all in town who have not quite forgotten
me. Beg Lady ------ to send Elizabeth a subscription ticket for Almack's,
and--oh, talking of Almack's, I think my boy's eyes are even more blue
and beautiful than Lady C-----'s.
Adieu, my dear Julia, Ever, &c. E. M.

Lady Emily Mandeville was the daughter of the Duke of Lindvale. She
married, at the age of sixteen, a man of large fortune, and some
parliamentary reputation. Neither in person nor in character was he
much beneath or above the ordinary standard of men. He was one of
Nature's Macadamised achievements. His great fault was his equality;
and you longed for a hill though it were to climb, or a stone though it
were in your way. Love attaches itself to something prominent, even if
that something be what others would hate. One can scarce feel
extremes for mediocrity. The few years Lady Emily had been married
had but little altered her character. Quick in feeling, though regulated in
temper; gay less from levity, than from that first spring-tide of a heart
which has never yet known occasion to be sad; beautiful and pure, as
an enthusiast's dream of heaven, yet bearing within the latent and

powerful passion and tenderness of earth: she mixed with all a
simplicity and innocence which the extreme earliness of her marriage,
and the ascetic temper of her husband, had tendered less to diminish
than increase. She had much of what is termed genius--its warmth of
emotion--its vividness of conception--its admiration for the grand--its
affection for the good, and that dangerous contempt for whatever is
mean and worthless, the very indulgence of which is an offence against
the habits of the world. Her tastes were, however, too feminine and
chaste ever to render her eccentric: they were rather calculated to
conceal than to publish the deeper recesses of her nature; and it was
beneath that polished surface of manner common to those with whom
she mixed, that she hid the treasures of a mine which no human eye had
beheld.
Her health, naturally delicate, had lately suffered much from the
dissipation of London, and it was by the advice of physicians that she
had now come to spend the summer at E------. Lady Margaret Leslie,
who was old enough to be tired with the caprices of society, and Mrs.
Dalton, who, having just lost her husband, was forbidden at present to
partake of its amusements, had agreed to accompany her to her retreat.
Neither of them was perhaps much suited to Emily's temper, but youth
and spirits make almost any one congenial to us: it is from the years
which confirm our habits, and the reflections which refine our taste,
that it becomes easy to revolt us, and difficult to please.
On the third day after Emily's arrival at E------, she was sitting after
breakfast with Lady Margaret and Mrs. Dalton. "Pray," said the former,
"did you ever meet my relation, Mr. Falkland? he is in your immediate
neighbourhood." "Never;