We are not about to present them all to our reader, and will only beg to
introduce to his notice a few of the notabilities then present. _Place
aux dames!_ then; and, first of all, we beg attention to the dark-eyed,
dark-haired, and very delicately featured woman, who, in half-mourning,
and with a pretty but fantastically costumed girl beside her, is working
at an embroidery-frame close to the river. She is a Mrs. Penthony
Morris, the wife or the widow--both opinions prevail--of a Captain
Penthony Morris, killed in a duel, or in India, or alive in the
Marshalsea, or at Baden-Baden, as may be. She is striking-looking,
admirably dressed, has a most beautiful foot, as you may see where it
rests upon the rail of the chair placed in front of her, and is,
altogether, what that very smartly dressed, much-beringed, and essenced
young gentleman near her has already pronounced her, “a stunning fine
woman.” He is a Mr. Mosely, one of those unhappy young Londoners whose
family fame is ever destined to eclipse their own gentility, for he is
immediately recognized, and drawlingly do men inquire some twenty times
a day, “Ain't he a son of Trip and Mosely's, those fellows in Bond
Street?” Unhappy Trip and Mosely! why have you rendered yourselves so
great and illustrious? why have your tasteful devices in gauze, your
“sacrifices” in challis, your “last new things in grenadine,” made such
celebrity around you, that Tom Mosely, “out for his travels,” can no
more escape the shop than if he were languishing at a customer over a
“sweet article in white tarlatan”? In the two comfortable armchairs side
by side sit two indubitable specimens, male and female, of the Anglo-
Saxon family,--Mr. Morgan, that florid man, wiping his polished bald
head, and that fat lady fanning with all her might. Are they not
English? They are “out,” and, judging from their recorded experiences,
only dying to be “in” again. “Such a set of cheating, lying, lazy set of
rascals are these Italians! Independence, sir; don't talk to me of that
humbug! What they want is English travellers to fleece and English women
to marry.” Near to these, at full length, on two chairs, one of which
reclines against a tree at an angle of about forty degrees, sits our
Yankee acquaintance, whom we may as well present by his name, Leonidas
Shaver Quackinboss; he is smoking a “Virginian” about the size of a
marshal's bâton, and occasionally sipping at a “cobbler,” which with
much pains he has compounded for his own drinking. Various others of
different ranks and countries are scattered about, and in the centre of
all, at a small table with a lamp, sits a short, burly figure, with a
strange mixture of superciliousness and drollery in his face, as though
there were a perpetual contest in his nature whether he would be
impertinent or amusing. This was Mr. Gorman O'Shea, Member of Parliament
for Inchabogue, and for three weeks a Lord of the Treasury when
O'Connell was king.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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