MY VISITING BOOK.

“Ce seroit une belle chose que je ne susse vivre qu’avec les gens qui me sont agréables.”

Mad. De Sévigné.

To-day I looked over my visiting book, to clear out for the new year, and to eliminate some of the false and the foolish, who creep into every circle, however exclusive or small: for every body, from a duchess to a dairy-maid, may be exclusive in her own way. Not that I meant to carry my proscription to any great extent; for if I were to admit only the honest and the clever, I might as well shut up shop altogether. There are, however, degrees in all things; and there are some, so falsely false, and so foolishly dull, that principle and patience alike revolt, and so, out they go. But what is to be done with whole incursions from remote provinces,—large families from Bally, courts and castles, when one has a small house?—as, for example, Mrs. Botherum of Castle Botherum, Miss Botherum, Miss Anna Maria Botherum, Miss Jemima Matilda Botherum, Miss Honoria, and Miss Frances Botherum! Col. Botherum (of the yeomanry), Mr. Walter York Botherum, Mr. Ernest Augustus, and the Rev. Mortimer Botherum! Shem, Ham, and Japhet, “a terrible sight;”—and all this, when one has only a reception room, of which the divine Pasta said, the last time she did me the honour to sing in it, “On pourra aussi bien chanter dans un fiacre,” and a boudoir which might be placed on the show-table of a moderately sized London drawing-room: and this, too, with a passion for light as great as the Duchess de C——,⁠[30] and with lamps that would light up Erebus, and shew the slightest blot in the escutcheon of the toilette, where every body comes labelled for something.

No, this is beyond the acmé of human friendship! “Ainsi cuit, on aurait mangé son père,” says La Reynière of his favourite dish; and there are ridicules in dress, manner, and bearing, which might excuse one’s cutting, if not “eating” one’s mother. The want of birth, rank, or fortune, are such mere, such inevitable accidents, such universal liabilities, that nothing above the lowest order of intellect, or the most degrading toadyism to the great of all sorts, could stoop to exclude from their society those who, with the exception of such accidental distinctions, possessed every other. But dress and address are within the attainment of every body; and the man who visits you in the morning in a milk-white waistcoat,⁠[31] or the woman, who, in the evening, when she is announced, stops to make a curtesy at the door of your drawing-room, must be wholly beyond the pale of social redemption.

Such anomalies are always indicative of mauvais ton; and mauvais ton is the want of good sense or good company. If, however, the white waistcoat is held out as a flag of singularity by a marked man, why then it becomes a grade in itself, like Jerningham’s blue stockings, which founded a sect in literature. But since curtesies went out with hoops and all other grotesque things, the woman who curtesies is lost. She is inaccessible to all improvements, and will bring up her children to hate Catholic emancipation, gas, steam, and M’Adamised roads; her sons will stick fast by 1688, and her daughters will propagate the family curtesy to endless generations.

In this respect, we residents are better off than the country ladies who come to their own mansions in the squares, and the “rows,” and the “places,” for the season, and who have the whole country rising en masse to follow, and fill their drawing-rooms, just as they occupy the castle in the country, on the strength of electioneering interests or county politics and jobs. This reconciles one amazingly to the fee-simple proprietorship of a few flower pots in the balcony—the only terre I could ever call my own.

What, however, particularly amused me to-day, was, not my “mere Irish,” nor my “English of the Pale” visitors; but that, in looking over my list, for the few last years, I found an absolute congress from all parts of the known world; and that representatives of the four quarters of the earth had passed through my little taudis in Kildare-street. There was Major St. J—— B——, from Madras; Mr. B——, from Boston; Captain I——, from Calcutta; Col. T——, from Canada; Sir C. G——n, from the icebergs of Greenland, and Col. D——y, from the Kiosks of Ispahan; with many more droppers-in from the Ganges, and morning callers from the Ohio. There were, too, the Neri and Bianchi, from Florence; Imperialists and Nationalists from Lombardy, and Guelphs, Ghibelines, and carbonari, with romanticists and classicists, from all parts of Italy.

How prettily these historico-poetical names write down among the O’s and the Macs of my “native troops!” the Strozzi, and Frangipani, and Pucci, and Piasasco, and Ugoni and Pozzo, and Cimetelli, and Castiglione, and Pepe—all connected with struggles for liberty, and with illustrations in letters, both in modern and ancient times. Then comes my quota from Spain, canonicos of cathedrals in Madrid, members of the Cortes, deputies to the Pope, and ex-ministers of the constitutional régime; then follow the charming French voltigeurs,—voltigeurs of nature and the good new times, with their revolutionary names and imperial titles, my Dukes of D——a and M——llo, and the clever Du V——r and P——y, and Tha——rs; and my German professors, “truants from Gottingen,” who come to geologize, and to see Ireland and Dr. Macartney,⁠[32] and talk of Werner, and Kant, and Goëthe——.

Here, after all, lies the great compensation for the ills which authorship is heir to. It is the delightful privilege of literary notoriety to live in intelligence and communion with those whom, as Humboldt once said to me, “make the fifth part of the world so well worth the other four,” the feeling and the thinking. This order constitutes the free-masonry of nature, which she has organized to explore her great truths, and to feed the lamp, which, though veiled and shadowed by a succession of errors, still burns, and will continue to burn, eternal as the cause for which it was created. It is the consciousness of a remote reciprocity and silent communion with such gifted individuals that gives the moral courage, even to a female author, to tell those bold truths, which the base, the sordid, and the corrupt, are interested to deny. The tone of mind and talent of a woman especially fits her to enter into this mystic communion with kindred thinkers spread over the whole world. It belongs to her finesse and spirituality, to the feeling and the fancy that breathe over all she writes, thus to open a private intercourse, through the medium of the public press, to waft a sentiment to the pole, and speed a thought to the line—to revive a fading prepossession across the steep Atlantic, and to waken a latent association beyond the Alps; to direct a sally to Calcutta; to billet a mot d’énigme on New York; and with the air of writing for the world, or the ambition of composing for posterity, to feel only the inspiration of an individual influence, and to clear out a cargo of odd and pleasant things by the good ship Sympathy, certain of its reaching the destined port and of being deeply prized by the correspondent to whom they are consigned. How many pilgrims has “Julie” brought to Lausanne, and “Corinne” to Copet, who in this marching age have directed their movements to our “Ultima Irelande,” to visit its natural wonders; and who have made a station on their route, to drop a bead, and tell an ave, at the cell of one, whose zeal (if not her works) has entitled her to some consideration from the liberal and the free. When so many delightful spirits are abroad, who would not be always “at home,” to receive them? Alas, for the home!—the native home, that owes its charm, not to compatriot sympathy, or liberality, or genius, but to those

who bring the intellect of Europe along with them, to shame our insular ignorance and bigotted prejudices.

If I had not taken this glance at my little visiting book, I should have had a solace the less to console me for the privations and sacrifices, which all who live in Ireland, from motives of private affection or public principle, must endure. There, the peaceable enjoyments and courtesies of life, its distinctions and its honours, are for a caste; while, for all others, are reserved proscription or persecution!—the calumnies of a ribald press; and the contemptuous neglect, or (what is worse) the supercilious notice of that antinational class, which is alike insensible to genius and suspicious of patriotism. Among the great, the incalculable benefits to be conferred on Ireland by Catholic Emancipation, that of bettering the condition of private society, will not be the least valuable. Great rights and advantages come remotely and at intervals, to brighten, benefit, and improve the land to which they are granted; not so, the days, and hours, and minutes, that go to make up that existence, upon which a “long account of hate” between the oppressor and the oppressed has shed its bitter venom! What minute details of persecution!—what petty guerilla warfare, carried on from house to house, and street to street, in which no sex is spared—no virtues are a defence!—no talent forms a claim to compatriot respect! yet such has been the state of society in the most social of all countries for more than half a century! Should that act of common justice and common sense ever pass into a law—the act for removing Catholic disabilities, Ireland may still become one of the most liveable places in the empire. For there are still to be found in the native land of Swift, Goldsmith, Sterne, Sheridan, Burke, Grattan, Canning, and Moore, all the elements which tend to brighten and illuminate the happiest circles. The temperament of the nation is essentially mercurial, prone to social enjoyment, affectionate, humorous, and pleasure-loving: and when the removal of those atrocious distinctions, which have so long spread dissension, and occupied the national mind with national grievances, shall leave the genius of the people to its fair and rational play, it may be prophecied that the capital of Ireland will become one of the most agreeable, if not the most important, of European cities.

Under such auspices, how delightful to open a visiting book, in which the names of all who are now divided into parties, sects, and factions, shall be found, without recalling one unpleasant association—and when (no longer indebted for all social, all intellectual enjoyments to the foreign visitor from happier and more enlightened lands), we shall feel and own,