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    THE QUEENS OF SOCIETY.* lwho have td ideas

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    TOOKE'S DIVERSIONS.*

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    " 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 . JX " The Magi kneel at his feet , Kings of the East and the West ; But , instead of the angels ( mute Is the ' peace on earth' of their song ) , The peoples , perplexed and oppressed , Are sighing , ' How long , how long !' " Cardinals 1 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 1— 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 .

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    IT is a great pit } - that the people ,- cas so generally hick 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 ami most sceptical of us—who , if they venture upon the attempt to execute them , infallibly make , a terrible bungle . The truth is—we say it with all respect for ouv 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 , ive lis

    care , and patience , which he cannot or will not g . Especialy this the case with the bookmaking craft . What is easier than to hit upon a good subject for a book f What more difficult than-to make a good book upon it ? We are not speaking a 2 ^ ' ° pos de hottes . Grace and Philip Whabton , the authors of TJte Queens of Society , have provoked these most philosophical reflections . Wan ting ^ to make a book , theyjiave chosen a taking theme . They have even gone further , aiid 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

    tions of flatterers , and the meagre notices of newspapers , 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 were 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 carper . But there is little to interest us in a narration of the progressive manifestations of a young lady ' s beauty , although it may be pleasant enough to watch them in the living specimen , and little in the atory of her flirtations , unless—we grieve to confess it—a little scandal attaches to them .

    A writer , however , who pretends to tell the story should at least tell it accurately . Gkack and Philip Wijakton , both , or whichever is the JJyo spuakiug throughout the book , « eem to think this a small matter . We can better endure this fault , however , than their own prosing . Innumerable are the profound 'platitudes which they inflict upon the reader . If they have cost the writers juiylhing like tho pain they have cost us in that perusal which we havo undergone in the faithful discharge of our critical duty wo can well understand that they speak from melancholy experience in nllirming that , " Those who are not in the habit of writing , cannot conceive the exhaustion , tho effort , the dejection of mind and lassitude of body , which exertions of this nature , when continual , produce . " the

    The queens of socioly selected by our author ^ aro Duchess of MAULBOuoTjair , Madame IIoland , the Duchess of Devonshire , Ii . E . L ., Madame de Srvione , Lady Morgan , tho Duchess of Gordon , Madamo Kkcajiikr , Lady IIkrvkv , Mudtuno nu Stael , Mrs . Tiihalk , Lady Caroline Lamb , Mrs . Damkb , Madame do Depfand , Mr * . Montaou , the Countess of Prmbhokb , Mndairio de Maintbnon , and Lndy Mauy Wortley Montagu , { Some of these Indict ) are undoubtedly entitled to tho crown conferred upon them ; but others , such as pom * h . K . L ., were cortuinly not queens of society . They wero probably included to gratify the great purpose which tho authora seem to Iihvo liad in view , of passing ; under ono pretence or other , a ,, judgment Upon every , man or woman ' of mark in Frtincu or England sinco tho beginning of the seventeenth century . Every ono of these notorieties is lugged in upon

    no means so . Tho 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 correspondence of contemporaries , the hiuip ~ 6 T ) itir " o 1 ~ sTrth'iKts 7-tlre-dedica- " —

    some pretext , has his or her measure taken , and some of them o-et in different pages two or three very different measures . There is a complete farrago of names , and an awful confusion of dates . We are told that Madame » u DjiFEi-ND was a sceptic as a girl , ' because Voxtaike . had turned revelation into ridicule , and Rotxsseait had inaugurated a poetical deism ; Voltaire being at the time a youth without influence , and poor IIousseatj not having even been born . We are also informed that about the year 1053 the Court of Lours <^ uatorze , then a boy of fifteen under the rule of Mazarlv , 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 . Jekdan looking out of his B romp ton window at L . E . L . trundling her hoop , and profess our utter inability to comprehend the depth of misery involved in being linked as was the fair Devonshire to " a noble expletive . " StilCwith all these faults , the Queens <> f 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 danger . 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 .

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    milE fitness of the late Mr . Taylor to edit and supplement what - * - Tooke wrote will be at once acknowledged by every one who knows anything 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 , was subordinate to Tooke ths foremost friend of freedom and sufferer in her cause . Taj lor the ardent and

    competent philoiogei * , was subordinate to Taylor "the learned printer , " who was responstbleiindf illustrious for-the aceurate = }> roductioii of the best learned and scientific publications produced in his lifetime , net 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 Tooke was in the thick of the fight , with Juuius , and Wilkes , and Churchill ; lie upheld the cause of the American colonists against infuriate English bigotry ; he suffered for lhat 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 Bmbitternient of his etirlv enforced ordination . The congenial

    amentcrcd 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 Snruin , most notorious of the old rotten boroughs . Even when that was attained , his membership provoked Aldington ' 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 , as if to increase the sense of strange and regretful interest which attaches to our contemplation of his life , the last prominent notice we hiivo of him is thia . In iho last

    year of his life Chantrey , then young and unknown , modelled his b . u . st , and placed it in the Academy exhibition of the season . The eiligy was an excellent transcript ot " the old inun , wasted by sickness " with a nightcap on his head , totally unlike his former self , but fearfully like him at tho ( then ) present moment . " It was the lelituro of the artistic show of the year . A few admired , because they admitted the likeness , yet wero appalled by Iho itnlikenats to their recollections , which only demonstrated tho more the likely vraitteiw bhtnre to the old man as he then appeared . More spectators wondered and gazed , because , although they had not seen tho luce , they recollctcd tho daring and self-possession evinced at the Queen ' s Bench trial , remembered the man ' s name as n name of power ami popularity , and read , wittingly or unwittingly , tho old homily of human decay and tho vanity of human wishes in the cold and dummy representation of tho wastod features . Minor incidents of tho event wero these . The eccentric NollikeiiH , an academician , with most unacadeinic liberality , removed a bust of lii . s own that the young ju'tist might get n better place for Tooko ' s head . Cnantrey ' s success in this work was his ih ' bt atop to fortune , and brought him ten thousand pounds worth of conimiHtiionH . • To all this picture , meagrely , enough sketched , and capable of much congruous detailed iilling up , Mr . Taylor ' s life presents a .-- , .,, . . ... . . _ . __ . .- _ . . . . ..,. _ ...,.-. _„ -r « ¦ ¦ (¦ *¦

    bition , which selected the legal profession for its ladder , was frustKLtfldl by . the refusal of the benchers of the inn at which he had

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    426 The Leader and Saturday Analyst . [ May 5 , 1 SG 0 .

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    * Tho Queens of Sociotj / , By 0 « A 0 E and l ' mur Whauto . v . Two Vola . Jiunes Hogg and Sons .

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    * EnEA riTEPOENTA } or , the Jiivemioiitt of Pitrlcj / . By John IIoUNH Tooke . With numerous Additions prepared by tho Author for rcnublicjition ; to which la added , his 1-iettur to John Duuuiiu ? , Ksq . Kevidcd and Corrected , with Additional Notos , by IUqiiaud TAVl < 01 t , F . S . A ., F , JL . fcJ . London ' : William To « g . 1800 .

    The Queens Of Society.* Lwho Have Td Ideas

    who have toort ui THE QUEENS OF SOCIETY . *

    Tooke's Diversions.*

    TOOKE'S DIVERSIONS . *

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), May 5, 1860, page 426, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2346/page/14/