The dinner at Saville’s was gay and lively, as such entertainments with such participators usually are. If nothing in the world is more heavy than your formal banquet,--nothing, on the other hand, is more agreeable than those well-chosen laissez aller feasts at which the guests are as happily selected as the wines; where there is no form, no reserve, no effort; and people having met to sit still for a few hours are willing to be as pleasant to each other as if they were never to meet again. Yet the conversation in all companies not literary turns upon persons rather than things; and your wits learn their art only in the School for Scandal. “Only think, Fanny,” said Saville, “of Clavers turning beau in his old age! He commenced with being a jockey; then he became an electioneerer; then a Methodist parson; then a builder of houses; and now he has dashed suddenly up to London, rushed into the clubs, mounted a wig, studied an ogle, and walks about the Opera House swinging a cane, and, at the age of fifty-six, punching young minors in the side, and saying tremulously, ‘_We_ young fellows!’” “He hires pages to come to him in the Park with three-cornered notes,” said Fanny, “he opens each with affected nonchalance; looks full at the bearer; and cries aloud--‘Tell your mistress I cannot refuse her:’--then canters off, with the air of a man persecuted to death!” “But did you see what an immense pair of whiskers Chester has mounted?” “Yes,” answered a Mr. De Lacy; “A---- says he has cultivated them in order to ‘plant out’ his ugliness.” “But vy _you_ no talk, Monsieur de Dauphin?” said the Linettini gently, turning to Percy; “you ver silent.” “Unhappily, I have been so long out of town that these anecdotes of the day are caviare to me.” “But so,” cried Saville, “would a volume of French Memoirs be to any one that took it up for the first time; yet the French Memoirs amuse one exactly as much as if one had lived with the persons written of. Now that ought to be the case with conversations upon persons. I flatter myself, Fanny, that you and I hit off characters so well by a word or two, that no one who hears us wants to know anything more about them.” “I believe you,” said Godolphin; “and that is the reason you never talk of yourselves.” “Bah! Apropos of egoism, did you meet Jack Barabel in Rome?” “Yes, writing his travels. ‘Pray,’ said he to me (seizing me by the button) in the Coliseum, ‘What do you think is the highest order of literary composition?’ ‘Why, an epic, I fancy,’ said I; ‘or perhaps a tragedy, or a great history, or a novel like Don Quixote.’ ‘Pooh!’ quoth Barabel, looking important, ‘there’s nothing so high in literature as a good book of travels;’ then sinking his voice into a whisper and laying his finger wisely on his nose, he hissed out, ‘I have a quarto, sir, in the press!’”