In consequence, while there never was a royal drawing-room so fresh and new in the dresses and ignorance of the fair attendants, there never perhaps was one in which the appearance of those attendants themselves was more sage and matured. Every lonely tower, in a remote glen, around whose grey battlements the hollow wind had whistled, “Nobody coming to marry me,” for more returnings of the falling leaf than it would be seemly to mention, poured forth its tall and time-learned damsels,--erewhile as grey as its walls, but now as green as the lichen with which they are incrusted, and as gorgeous as the sun whose beams find out the old tower the more easily, and gild them the more copiously, in proportion to the leaflessness of all around. With those mingled the dowagers and despairers of George’s Square, upon the thresholds of whose doors, and the graves of whose hopes, the grass had for more than moons waxed green apace. Nor were there wanting a few of somewhat more juvenile an aspect; abundance of manœuvring dames, who had exposed the precious wares of their own manufacture at all the marts and bazaars in the island; with other languishing and loving ladies whose number it were difficult to count. But, in their zeal to suit the royal taste in the maturity of the greater part of the muster, they had rather overshot the mark. If the tale of that taste says sooth, the word “forty,” which is to be found in every country, and which, in single dignity and desire, is found more abundantly in Scotland, and especially in the Athens, than in any country, is preceded by the words “fat and fair,” which, in that land, and pre-eminently in that city, are among the _desiderata_. Hence, there perchance was never collected before a pair of royal eyes so many tall, gaunt, and ungainly figures, and never offered to the salutation of a pair of royal lips, so many sunken and sinewy cheeks. In their costumes, they were uncommonly splendid: sweeping trains of white satin, over spangled robes of various fancies, (in nowise emblematical of “white without and spotted within,”) were the predominant costumes; and, in number and in magnitude, the plumes of feathers which waved and nodded above, might have furnished all the beds, bolsters, and pillows, to the court of Og, the giant king of Bashan. In the dresses, too, there were all the advantage of contrast with the wearers: the one were as fresh and as new as the others were furrowed and old. And this did not escape the discriminating eye of the King, who, though he prudently abstained from all commendation on the score of beauty, was copious on that of cleanliness. In their previous estimate of the royal taste, they had not calculated with their usual wisdom. To the more sage and skinny dames, the appulse was so slight and so brief, that before the agitation was over, the impression was gone; and, of the whole that attended, only one little and lovely girl could boast of a palpable and positive kiss.