THE BOOK OF THE BOUDOIR. MY BOOK. LAST night, as we circled round the fire in the little red room in Kildare Street, by courtesy called a boudoir, talking about everything, anything, and nothing at all, I happened to give out some odds and ends, that amused those who, truth to tell, are not among the least amusable; when somebody said, "Why do you not write down all this?" and here is a blank book placed before me for the express purpose. But I suspect there is no talking upon paper, as one talks "les pieds couchés sur les chenets." I feel, at least at this mo ment, that there is all the difference in the world between sitting bolt upright, before a marble-covered, blue-lined, lank, ledger-looking, Threadneedle-street sort of a volume, for the purpose of opening a running account with one's own current ideas, and the sinking into the downy depths of an easy chair, and "then and there, without let and molestation" (as the old Irish passport has it), giving a careless and unheeded existence to the infinite deal of nothings which lie latent in the memories of all such, as have seen and heard much, and have been "over the hills and far away. Thoughts that breathe" will not always write; "words that burn" are apt to cool down as they are traced; visions that " come like shadows," will also "so depart ;" and the brightest exhalations of the mind, which are drawn forth by the sunny influence of social confidence, like other exhalations, will dissipate by their own lightness, and (beyond the reach of fixture or condensation) "make themselves air, into which they vanish." I never, in my life, kept a common-place-book for preserving such " Cynthias of the minute." I have even an antipathy to all albums and vademecums, and such charitable repositories for fugitive thoughts, and thoughtless effusions—reveries which were never révés-and impromptus laboured at leisure. I hardly think I can bring myself to open a regular saving bank for the odd cash of mind, the surplus of round sums placed at legal interest in the great public fund of professed authorship: "on renvoye tout cela à la pédantisme." Still, however, in the days of pure pedantry, the days of the Scaligers, Pasquiers, Balzacs, and Thuanuses, genius and simplicity, and high philosophy too, found frequent shelter in such daily ledgers of spontaneous thought, and feeling."Each day of my life is a page in my book," says the learned Menage, who scribbled his agreeable Ana, while` Mesdames Sévigné and Deshoulières sat disputing in his chimney corner, on the merits of coffee, and of Racine, or the fashion of an hurlubrelu. It was such a book, lying temptingly open on the old oak table in the gothic library of the château Montaigne, that led the charming" Michel, gentilhomme Perigordin," to note down, (in the pauses of more studied com |