there in consultation, as she 'knew
everybody.' She congratulated me on my _debut_ as an authoress, (I had
recently published my first book, 'Sketches of Irish Character,') and
politely added, 'Now you are one of us, I shall be happy to receive you
at my humble abode.'

"I begged to decline the proposal concerning the wild Irish girl and the
Irish harp, but agreed to carry a basket of flowers. Certainly the
_fete_-givers worked 'with a will,' turned the great house 'out of
windows,' converting the two school-rooms, big and little, into a
ball-room, and decorating it richly with green leaves and roses, real
and artificial. I congratulated them on the prospect. 'Yes,' said Miss
Landon, 'the mechanical getting-up is all very well; I wish all that is
termed "dashing" did not lie in the tomb of the Duchess of Gordon. A
quadrille is but still life put into motion. Our faces, like our
summers, want sunshine. Old Froissart complained in his day, that the
English, after their fashion, "_s'amusent moult tristement_." A
ball-room is merely "Arithmetic and the use of figures taught here." A
young lady in a quadrille might answer,--"I am too busy to laugh,--I am
making my calculations." And yet ours is not a marrying age; the men
have discovered that servants and wives are _so_ expensive,--still a
young lady's delight in a ball, if not _raisonnable_, has
always--_quelque raison!_ and I am determined, if I die in the cause,
that ours shall be a success!' Her conversation was always epigrammatic.

"It seems absurd that a ball should be the first great event of my
literary life. There I saw for the first time many persons who became in
after-years intimate friends, and whose names are now parts of the
history of the literature of their country. 'Mr.' Edward Bulwer, then on
the threshold of fame, 'came out' in military uniform. L. E. L. assured
me he was very clever, had written a novel, and 'piles of poetry,' and
would be wonderful soon, but that he was much too handsome for an
author; at which opinion, little Miss Spence, in a plum-pudding sort of
turban, with a bird-of-paradise bobbing over the front, and a fan even
larger than poor Lady Morgan's, agitated her sultana's dress, and
assured me that 'nothing elevated the expression of beauty so much as
literature,' and that 'young things, like many of the present company,
would not look as well in ten years!' Mr. Bulwer was certainly
pronounced by the ladies the handsomest youth in th