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Leader (1850-1860), 5th May 1860, Edition 2 of 2, Page 14, THE QUEENS OF, SOCIETY.* I T is a great ...

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      Poems Before Congress. By Elizabeth. Baj...

      " The star is lost in the dark ; , The manger is lost in the straw ; ' ' The Christ cries faintly—hark ! Through , bands that swaddle and strangle-But the Pope in the chair of awe Looks down the great quadrangle . " The Magi kneel at his feet , Kings of the East and the West ; But , instead o . f the angels ( mute Is the ' peace on earth * of their song ) , The peoples , perplexed and oppressed , Are sighing , ' How long , how long . ' * " Cardinals left and right of him , Worshippers round and beneath , _ , The silver trumpets at sight of him Thrill with a musical blast : But the people say through their teeth , ' Trumpets!—we wait for the Last I" * Single hand , Mrs . Browning has to fight an up-hill fight ; but while she writes like this she will not be worsted .-

      426 The Leader And Saturday Analyst. [Ma...

      426 The Leader and Saturday Analyst . [ May 5 , 1860 .

      The Queens Of, Society.* I T Is A Great ...

      THE QUEENS OF , SOCIETY . * I T is a great pity that the people who have good ideas so generally lack the ability to carry them out . How many men we all know , with the most brilliant schemes—nay , with plans which seem promising even to the coolest and most sceptical of us—who , if they renture upon the attempt to execute them , infallibly make a terrible bungle . The truth is—we say it with all respect for our imaginative friends—that a clever conception is infinitely easier work than its embodiment . A man may sit down and . spin out taking projects by the bushel , without any labour ; but the attempt to work out any one of them would necessitate an amount of toil , careand patience , which he cannot or will not give . Especially is

      , this the case with the bookmaking craft . Wltfit is easier than to-hit upon a good subject for a book P What more difficult than to make a good book upoii it ? We are hot speaking a propos de lottes . Geace and PaiLii ? Whautost , the authors of The Queens of Society ; haxe provoked these most philosophical reflections . Wanting to make a book , they have chosen ^ taking theme . They have even gone further , and collected a mass of materials ; -= those materials . * however , they have been unable , or unwilling , to complete , still less to sift or digest ; and the result is a book which , stripped of irrelevant digressions and unnecessary homilies , corrected as to dates and names , and compressed within one-third of its present size , might have been very readable , but in its existing form , is by

      no means so . t The lives of the famous women who by the magic of their wit or beauty have gathered round them the rank and intelligence of their day , and exercised over the tastes , fashions , and even politics of the age an irresistible influence , must always possess a remarkable interest . But the story of those lives is not often an easy one to read . Little light is thrown upon it by the authentic records and official documents , which serve as the ordinary material for history ; it has to be gathered from numberless sources—the correof th of satiriststhe dediCTP

      Bpondence contemporaries , e lampoons , tions of flatterers , and the meagre notices of nevyspapers , if newspapers there then were . And then , after all this necessary research and comparison , the general result will mostly be , simply that they lived and i ! vere admired . Of the queens of society who have not ¦ written their own , history , it is impossible to know much , and after all , perhaps the knowledge is not very desirable . We like to note the development of genius in the poet , painter , or statesman , and trace him from his boyhood to the close of his career . But there is little to interest us in a narration of the progressive manifestations of a

      young lady's beanty , although it may be pleasant enough to watch them in the living-specimen , and little in the story of her flirtations , ¦ nnl ess—wo grieve to confess , it—a little scandal attaches to them . A . writcrj . however , who pretends to toll the story should at least tell it accurately . Ghace and Philip Whaiiton , both , or whichever is the Ego speaking throughout the bookj seem to think this a email matter . Wo can better enduro this fault , however , than their own prosing . Innumerable are the profound platitudes which . they inflict upon the reader . If they have cost the writers anything like the pain they have cost us in that perusal which we have undergone in the faithful discharge of our critical duty we can well understand that they speak from melancholy experience in affirming that , " Those who are not in the habit of writing , cannot conceive the exhaustion , the effort , the dejection of mind and lassitude of body , which exertions of this nature , when continual , produce . "

      The queens of society selected by our authors are the Duchess of Marlbokough , Madame Roland , the Duchess of DEVONsnmu , I * . E . L ., Mndame de Sevione , Lady Mokcun , the Duchess of Gordon , Madame Rkoamiek , Lady Heuvey , Madame » b Stael , Mrs . Thbai / k , Lndy Caroline ; Lamb , Mrs , Pamer , Ma . damo du Deffand , Mrs . Montagu , the Countess of Pembroke , Madame » e MAisTTEjrojr , and X » ndy Maby Woktlby Montaou . Somo of these ladies aro undoubtedly entitled to the crown conferred upon them ; but others , such as poor L . E . L ., wero certuinly not queens of society . They were probably included [ to gratify the great purpose which the authors seem to have had in view , of passing , under one pretence or other , a judgment upon every man op woman of mark in France or England since the beginning of the seventeenth century . Evory one of these notorieties is lugged ii \ upon

      some pretext , has his or her measure taken , and some of them <* et in different pages two or . three ver / differen ^ measures . There is a compl ete farrago of names , and an awful contusion of dates . We are told that Madame Dir Deffand was a sceptic as a girl , because Voltaire had turned revelation into ridicule , and Rousseau had inaugurated a poetical deism ? Voltaire being at the time a youth without influence , and poor Bottsseau not having even been born . We are also informed that about the year 1653 the Court of Louis Quatorze , then a boy of fifteen under the rule of Mazarin , was in its highest glory , and ^ a goodly number of great men are enumerated as its ornaments who

      were still schoolboys . We might go on with such specimens for any number of columns , but we don't care to break butterflies upon the wheel - and we will only protest against being called upon to go into ecstacies of enthusiasm at the spectacle of Mr . Jeudan looking out of his Brompton window at L . E . L . trundling her hoop , and profess our utter inability to comprehend the depth of misery involved in beino- linked as was the fair Devonshire to " a noble expletive . " Still , with all these faults , the Queens of Society has as good a claim to a place on the drawing-room table as many volumes to be found there . It should not be read ; of that , however , there

      is little dangpr . It cannot be relied on ; but an idle halt-hour may be well enough spent in turning over its pages , and picking out its anecdotes and gossip . The book is handsomely got up , and although two or three of its illustrations are absolute caricatures , the majority are very well conceived and executed .

      * The Queens Of Soctvtj/. By Gftaob And ...

      * The Queens of Soctvtj / . By GftAOB and Vnihiv Wiiauton , Two Vole . James Homr and Sons .

      Tooke's Dive11sions. * Rnile Fitness Of ...

      TOOKE'S DIVE 11 SIONS . * rnilE fitness of the late Mr . Taylor to edit and supplement what - * - Tooke wrote will be at once acknowledged by every one who knows any thing of either of the two men , or who has paid any attention to comparative grammar and philology . And yet there is a strange incongruousness and contrast in the association of these two -names upon the same title-page . Both , it is true , Were scholarly men ; each of them was best known to his contemporaries in other capacities ; each had his-energies most largely engaged in fields foreign to the writing and the annotating : this book . Tooke the philosophic grammarian , wasssubordinate to Tooke the foremost friend of freedom and sufferer in her cause .- Taylor the ardent and competent philologer , was subordinate to Taylor " the 'learned

      printer , " who was responsible and illustrious for the accurate production of the best learned and scientific publications produced in his lifetime , not long since closed . But the contrast appears and forces itself upon the mind , when you regard more closely the lives of the two men whose names are placed in this juxtaposition . Home Tooko was in the thick of the fight with Juntas , and Wilkes , and Churchill ; he upheld the cause Of the American colonists against infuriate English bigotry ; he suffered for that courage . Again , later in his life , the recurring , anti-Jacobin , bigotry once more made him the victim of imprisonment and fine . His whole life bore the embitterment of his early enforced ordination . The congenial ambition , which selected the legal profession for its ladder , was

      frustrated— by ^ t & e ^ 'efusaI- ^ f ~ theJbencheia ^ jf ~ JJie _^ entered to call to the bar one who was yet in indelible " orders . " Wishful to enter Parliament , although debarred the exercise of the profession to ' which he had aspired , perhaps as much as a step to political distinction as for the sake of its money gains ; and although popular , and polling a large number of votes at least at ^ one Westminster election , he had at last to accept as the only inlet to the senate , a seat for Old Snrnm , most notorious of the old rotten boroughs . Even when that was attained , his membership provoked Addington's declaratory law , which excluded all who had been clergymen from Parliamentary seats , and thus , at the very crisis of ultimate success , effectually drove him from all hopes of power or political preferment . And , us if to increase the sense- of strange and regretful interest which attaches to our contemplation of his life / the last prominent notice wo have of him is this . In the lust

      year of his life Chantrey , then young and unknown , modelled his bust , and placed it in the Academy exhibition of the season . The effigy was an excellent transcript of " the old man , wasted by sickness , with a nightcap on his head , totally unlike his former self , but fearfully like him at the ( then ) present , moment . " It was the feature of the artistic show of the year . A few admired , because they admitted the likeness , yet were appalled by the unlikencss to their recollections , which only demonstrated the more the likely vraiseni " blance to the old man as he then appeared . More spectators wondered and gazed , because , although they had not seon the face , they recol " lcted the daring and self-possession evinced at the Queen ' s Bench trial , remembered the man ' s name as a namo of power and popularity , and read , wittingly or unwittingly , the old homily of human decay and the vanity of human wished in the cold and clammy representation of the wasted fontures . Minor incidents of the evont wero

      those . The occentrio . jNollikens , an academician ; with most uimcudomic liberality , removed a bust of his own that- the young artist might got a better place for Tooke ' s head . Chantrey ' s success in this work was hit * first step to fortuno , and brought him ten thousand pounds' worth of commissions . ' To all this picture , meagrely enough sketched , and capable of much congruous detailed' filling up , Mr . Taylor ' s , life presents a

      * Eitea Iitepoenta 5 Ov, The J)!Rcr«I<»I...

      * EITEA IITEPOENTA 5 ov , the J )! rcr « i <» i . i of PurleyS IJy JOHN IJoilNn Tookb . With numerous Additions prepnred by the Author for republlcation ; to ¦ which is added , his Letter to John Cunning , Esq . Jtevisod find Corrected , with Additional Notes , by Hiohahd Taylor , F . S . A ., F . L . ti . London : William Togg . I 860 .

  • Citation
    • Leader (1850-1860), May 5, 1860, page 14, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_05051860/page/14/