dge. Her
ladyship was of humble, I have heard even menial, station originally,
but becomes her present rank, dispenses the most elegant hospitality
at her mansion in Connaught Terrace, and is a pattern as a wife and
a mother. The young man talking to her daughter is a young barrister,
already becoming celebrated as a contributor to some of our principal
reviews."

"Who is that cavalry officer in a white waistcoat talking to the Jew
with the beard?" asks the Colonel.

"He, he! That cavalry officer is another literary man of celebrity, and
by profession an attorney. But he has quitted the law for the Muses, and
it would appear that the Nine are never wooed except by gentlemen with
mustachios."

"Never wrote a verse in my life," says the Colonel, laughing, and
stroking his own.

"For I remark so many literary gentlemen with that decoration. The
Jew with the beard, as you call him, is Herr von Lungen, the eminent
hautboy-player. The three next gentlemen are Mr. Smee, of the Royal
Academy (who is shaved as you perceive), and Mr. Moyes and Mr.
Cropper, who are both very hairy about the chin. At the piano, singing,
accompanied by Mademoiselle Lebrun, is Signor Mezzocaldo, the great
barytone from Rome. Professor Quartz and Baron Hammerstein, celebrated
geologists from Germany, are talking with their illustrious confrere,
Sir Robert Craxton, in the door. Do you see yonder that stout gentleman
with stuff on his shirt? the eloquent Dr. McGuffog, of Edinburgh,
talking to Dr. Ettore, who lately escaped from the Inquisition at Rome
in the disguise of a washerwoman, after undergoing the question several
times, the rack and the thumbscrew. They say that he was to have been
burned in the Grand Square the next morning; but between ourselves, my
dear Colonel, I mistrust these stories of converts and martyrs. Did you
ever see a more jolly-looking man than Professor Schnurr, who was locked
up in Spielberg, and got out up a chimney, and through a window? Had
he waited a few months there are very few windows he could have passed
through. That splendid man in the red fez is Kurbash Pasha--another
renegade, I deeply lament to say--a hairdresser from Marseilles, by name
Monsieur Ferehaud, who passed into Egypt, and laid aside the tongs for a
turban. He is talking with Mr. Palmer, one of our most delightful
young poets, and with Desmond O'Tara, son of the late revered Bishop of
Ballinafad, who has lately quitted ours for the errors of the Ch