Читать книгу Coelebs In Search of a Wife - Hannah More - Страница 13

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The house of Sir John Belfield was become a pleasant kind of home to me. He and his lady seldom went out in an evening. Happy in each other and in their children, though they lived much with the rational, they associated as little as they thought possible with the racketing world. Yet being known to be generally at home, they were exposed to the inroads of certain invaders, called fine ladies, who, always afraid of being too early for their parties, are constantly on the watch how to disburden themselves for the intermediate hour, of the heavy commodity time; a raw material, which as they seldom work up at home, they are always willing to truck against the time of their more domestic acquaintance. Now as these last have always something to do, it is an unfair traffic; "all the reciprocity is on one side," to borrow the expression of an illustrious statesman; and the barter is as disadvantageous to the sober home-trader, as that of the honest negroes, who exchange their gold-dust and ivory for the beads and bits of glass of the wily English.

These nightly irruptions, though sometimes inconvenient to my friends, were of use to me, as they enabled me to see and judge more of the gay world than I could have done without going in search of it; a risk which I thought bore no proportion to the gain. It was like learning the language of the enemy's country at home.

One evening, when we were sitting happily alone in the library, Lady Belfield, working at her embroidery, cheerfully joining in our little discussions, and comparing our peaceful pleasures with those pursued by the occupiers of the countless carriages which were tearing up the "wheel-worn streets," or jostling each other at the door of the next house, where a grand assembly was collecting its myriads—Sir John asked what should be the evening book. Then rising, he took down from the shelf Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination.

"Is it," said he, as soon as he sat down, "the rage for novelty, or a real degeneracy of taste, that we now so seldom hear of a poet, who, when I was a boy, was the admiration of every man who had a relish for true genius? I can not defend his principles, since in a work, of which Man is professedly the object, he has overlooked his immortality: a subject which one wonders did not force itself upon him, as so congenial to the sublimity of his genius, whatever his religious views might have been. But to speak of him only as a poet; a work which abounds in a richer profusion of images, and a more variegated luxuriance of expression than the Pleasures of Imagination, can not easily be found. The flimsy metre of our day seems to add fresh value to his sinewy verse. We have no happier master of poetic numbers; none who better knew