Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB
[graphic][subsumed][merged small][subsumed]

THE TALKING LADY.

BY MISS MITFORD.

BEN JONSON has a play called The Silent Woman, who turns out, as might be expected, to be no woman at all — nothing, as Master Slender said, “but a great lubberly boy;" thereby, as I apprehend, discourteously presuming that a silent woman is a nonentity. If the learned dramatist, thus happily prepared and pre-disposed, had happened to fall in with such a specimen of female loquacity as I have just parted with, he might, perhaps, have given us a pendant to his picture in the Talking Lady. Pity but he had! He would have done her justice, which I could not at any time, least of all now: I am too much stunned; too much like one escaped from a belfry on a coronation day. I am just resting from the fatigue of four days' hard listening; four snowy, sleety, rainy days - days of every variety of falling weather, all of them too bad to admit the possibility that any petticoated thing, were she as hardy as a Scotch fir, should stir out, four days chained by "sad civility" to

that fire-side, once so quiet, and again-cheering thought! again I trust to be so, when the echo of that visiter's incessant tongue shall have died away.

The visiter in question, is a very excellent and respectable elderly lady, upright in mind and body, with a figure that does honor to her dancing-master, a face exceedingly well preserved, wrinkled and freckled, but still fair, and an air of gentility over her whole person, which is not the least affected by her out-offashion garb. She could never be taken for any thing but a woman of family, and perhaps she could as little pass for any other than an old maid. She took us in her way from London to the West of England: and being, as she wrote, "not quite well, not equal to much company, prayed that no other guest might be admitted, so that she might have the pleasure of our conversation all to herself," (Ours! as if it were possible for any of us to slide in a word edgewise!) "and especially enjoy the gratification of talking over old times with the master of the house, her countryman." Such was the promise of her letter, and to the letter it has been kept. All the news and scandal of a large county, forty years ago, and a hundred years before, and ever since, all the marriages, deaths, births, elopements, lawsuits and casualties of her own times, her father's, grandfather's, great-grandfather's, nephew's, and grand-nephew's, has she detailed with a minuteness, an accuracy, a prodigality of learning, a profuseness of proper names, a pedantry of locality,

which would excite the envy of a county historian, a king-at-arms, or even a Scotch novelist. Her knowledge is astonishing; but the most astonishing part of all is, how she came by that knowledge. It should seem, to listen to her, as if, at some time of her life, she had listened herself; and yet her countryman declares, that in the forty years he has known her, no such event has occured; and she knows new news, too! It must be intuition.

The manner of her speech has little remarkable. It is rather old-fashioned and provincial, but perfectly lady-like, low and gentle, and not seeming so fast as it is; like the great pedestrians she clears her ground easily, and never seems to use any exertion; yet, “I would my horse had the speed of her tongue, and so good a continuer." She will talk you sixteen hours a day for twenty days together, and not deduct one poor five minutes for halts and baiting time. Talking, sheer talking, is meat and drink and sleep to her. She likes nothing else. Eating is a sad interruption For the tea-table she has some toleration; but dinner, with its clatter of plates and jingle of knives and forks, dinner is her abhorrence. Nor are the other common pursuits of life more in her favor. Walking exhausts the breath that might be better employed. Dancing is a noisy diversion, and singing is worse; she cannot endure any music, except the long, grand, dull concerto, which nobody thinks of listening to. Reading and chess she classes together as silent barbarisms,

« ZurückWeiter »