nd Miss S----.

My only reminiscence connected with this dinner at Lady Morgan's is of
her kind and comical zeal to show me an Irish jig, performed _secundum
artem_, when she found that I had never seen her national dance. She
jumped up, declaring nobody danced it as well as herself, and that I
should see it immediately; and began running through the rooms, with a
gauze scarf that had fallen from her shoulders fluttering and trailing
after her, calling loudly for a certain young member of the viceregal
staff, who was among the guests invited to a large evening party after
the dinner, to be her partner. But the gentleman had already departed
(for it was late), and I might have gone to my grave unenlightened upon
the subject of jigs if I had not seen one performed, to great
perfection, by some gay young members of a family party, while I was
staying at Worsley with my friends Lord and Lady Ellesmere, whose
children and guests got up an impromptu ball on the occasion of Lady
Octavia Grosvenor's birthday, in the course of which the Irish national
dance was performed with great spirit, especially by Lord Mark Kerr and
Lady Blanche Egerton. It resembles a good deal the saltarello of the
Italian peasants in rhythm and character; and a young Irishman, servant
of some friends of mine, covered himself with glory by the manner in
which he joined a party of Neapolitan tarantella dancers, merely by dint
of his proficiency in his own native jig. A great many years after my
first acquaintance with Lady Morgan in Dublin, she renewed our
intercourse by calling on me in London, where she was spending the
season, and where I was then living with my father, who had become
almost entirely deaf and was suffering from a most painful complication
of maladies. My relations with the lively and amusing Irish authoress
consisted merely in an exchange of morning visits, during one of which,
after talking to me with voluble enthusiasm of Cardinal Gonsalvi and
Lord Byron, whose portraits hung in her room, and who, she assured me,
were her two pre-eminent heroes, she plied me with a breathless series
of pressing invitations to breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, evening
parties, to meet everybody in London that I did and did not know, and
upon my declining all these offers of hospitable entertainment (for I
had at that time withdrawn myself entirely from society, and went
nowhere), she exclaimed, "But what in the world do you _do_ with
yourself in the eve