_Adieu, my charming friend, my amiable, my all Accomplished associate! conceive the ardour of Your lovers united with your own sensibility-- Still will the compound be but faintly expressive Of the truth and tenderness of your_ LETITIA BLANDISH. There's phrase--there's a period--match it, if you can. _Blandish._ Not I, indeed: I am working upon a quite different plan: but, in the name of the old father of adulation, to whom is that perfect phrase addressed? _Mrs. Blandish._ To one worth the pains, I can tell you--Miss Alscrip. _Blandish._ What, sensibility to Miss Alscrip! My dear sister, this is too much, even in your own way: had you run changes upon her fortune, stocks, bonds, and mortgages; upon Lord Gayville's coronet at her feet, or forty other coronets, to make footballs of if she pleased,--it would have been plausible; but the quality you have selected---- _Mrs. Blandish._ Is one she has no pretensions to; therefore the flattery is more persuasive--that's my maxim. _Blandish._ And mine also, but I don't try it quite so high--Sensibility to Miss Alscrip! you might as well have applied it to her uncle's pig-iron, from which she derives her first fifty thousand; or the harder heart of the old usurer, her father, from which she expects the second. But come, [_Rings._] to the business of the morning. _Enter PROMPT._ Here, Prompt--send out the chairman with the billets and cards.--Have you any orders, madam? _Mrs. Blandish._ [_Delivering her Letter._] This to Miss Alscrip, with my impatient inquiries after her last night's rest, and that she shall have my personal salute in half an hour.--You take care to send to all the lying-in ladies? _Prompt._ At their doors, madam, before the first load of straw. _Blandish._ And to all great men that keep the house--whether for their own disorders, or those of the nation? _Prompt._ To all, sir--their secretaries, and principal clerks. _Blandish._ [_Aside to PROMPT._] How goes on the business you have undertaken for Lord Gayville? _Prompt._ I have conveyed his letter, and expect this morning to get an answer. _Blandish._ He does not think me in the secret? _Prompt._ Mercy forbid you should be! [_Archly._ _Blandish._ I should never forgive your meddling. _Prompt._ Oh! never, never! _Blandish._ [_Aloud._] Well, dispatch---- _Mrs. Blandish._ Hold!--apropos, to the lying-in list--at Mrs. Barbara Winterbloom's, to inquire after the Angola kittens, and the last hatch of Java sparrows. _Prompt._ [_Reading his Memorandum as he goes out._] Ladies in the straw--ministers, &c.--old maids, cats, and sparrows: never had a better list of how d'ye's, since I had the honour to collect for the Blandish family. [_Exit._