on another, twelve
guests, who all had the misfortune to squint, amused their host with
their ludicrous cross lights; and on a third, the same number of
stutterers entertained him still more, not only by their uncouth
impediment, but by the anger with which they began to sputter at
one another, on the supposition that each was mocking his neighbor.
A short-hand writer, behind the scenes, was employed to take down
the conversation, which, says the witty essayist, was easily done,
inasmuch as one of the gentlemen was a quarter of an hour in saying
"that the ducks and green peas were very good," and another almost
an equal time in assenting to it. At the conclusion, however, the
derided guests became aware of the trick their entertainer had played
upon them; and from their hands, quicker than their tongues, he was
obliged to make a precipitate retreat. Our dinner-party of yesterday
did not break up in any such fracas, nor was the conversation so
unhappily restricted. Yet the company was hardly better assorted. To
bring it together, Harrington ransacked his immediate circle, and
Fellowes unconsciously recruited for him in the university town. Our
host had provided for our mutual edification an Italian gentleman,
with whom he had had some pleasant intercourse on the Continent, (by
the way he spoke English uncommonly well,) and now staying with a
Roman Catholic in the neighborhood: this gentleman himself, with
whom Harrington, by means of his former friend, has knocked up an
acquaintance (he is a liberal Catholic of the true British species);
our acquaintance, Fellowes, with his love of "insight" and
"spiritualism"! a young surgeon from ----., a rare, perhaps unique,
specimen of conversion to certain crude atheistical speculations of
Mr. Atkinson and Miss Martineau; a young Englishman (an acquaintance
of Harrington's) just fresh from Germany, after sundry semesters
at Bonn and Tubingen, five hundred fathoms deep in German philosophy,
and who hardly came once to the surface during the whole entertainment;
three Rationalists (acquaintances of Fellowes), standing at somewhat
different points in the spiritual thermometer, one a devoted advocate
of Strauss: add to these a Deist, no unworthy representative of the
old English school; one or two others further gone still; a Roman
Catholic priest, an admirer of Father Newman, who therefore believes
every thing; our sceptical friend Harrington, who believes nothing;
and myself, still f