Beside her sat, or rather lounged, another dame of quality, bearing the stamp of her class and caste as obviously, yet less deeply marked, than her companion. More feminine in her air, more foreign in her dress and entire bearing, her faultless form, and almost faultless face, had all the advantages of the new democratic toilet of Paris, (adopted by its court, when more important innovations were still fatally resisted;) and she appeared in the Phoenix Park, dressed much in the same costume as Marie Antoinette and her female favourites are described to have worn in the gardens of Trianon, or in the bowers of St. Cloud,--to the horror of all old _dames d'atours_, and all the partisans of the ancient regime of whalebone and buckram! The chemise of transparent muslin, or _robe à la Poliynae_, _chapeau de paille à la bergere_, tied down with a lilac ribbon, with "Scarf loosely flowing, hair as free," gave an air of sylph-like simplicity to one, whose features, though beautiful, were marked by an expression foreign to simplicity, evincing that taste, not sentiment, presided over her toilet, and that, "_chez elle, un beau desordre fut l'effet de l'art_." This triumphal car was followed, or surrounded, by a host of beaux; some in military uniform, and with true English faces and figures; but the greater number in the civil, though uncivilized, dress of the day, and with forms and physiognomies as Irish as ever were exhibited in Pale or Palatine, to the dread of English settlers and Scotch undertakers. Ponderous powdered clubs, hanging from heads of dishevelled hair--shoulders raised or stuffed to an Atlas height and breadth--the stoop of paviers, and the lounge of chairmen--broad beavers, tight buckskins, the striped vest of a groom, and the loose coat of a coachman, gave something ruffianly to the air of even the finest figures, which assorted but too well with the daring, dashing manner, that just then had succeeded, among a _particular set_, to the courtly polish for which the travelled nobility of Ireland were once so distinguished. Such, in exterior, were many of the members of the famous _Cherokee Club_, and such the future legislators of that great national indignity, which had procured them a contemptible pre-eminence in the black book of public opinion, by the style and title of the "_Union Lords_." As they now crowded round the cynosures of the day, there was something too ardent and unrestrained in their homage, something too emphatic in their expressions and gestures, for true breeding; while in their handsome, but "light, revelling, and protesting faces," traces of the night's orgies were still visible, which gave their fine features a licentious cast, and deprived their open and very manly countenances of every mark of intellectual expression.--_Lady Morgan's "O'Briens and O'Flahertys."_ * * * * * THE WEE MAN.