MR. OWEN’S TUNIC.

Talking the other day of small rooms and glaring lights, where all is in evidence, I made them my excuse for indulging in a tendency to make up my coterie of pleasant men and pretty women, and to keep out the twaddles of both sexes, for which I am much abused. It is not long since a philosophical friend of mine, one always deeply occupied in promoting the highest and best interests of society, by perfecting science in its most sublime and useful directions, called on me, and found me most frivolously, but earnestly, employed in filling up cards for a very small party. “I am come,” he said, “to ask a favour.” I started: for, delighted as at all times I am to improve my society by enlisting him amongst its members, I was yet terribly afraid he was going to ask leave to bring with him some of those young disciples, who flock to his class from all parts of Europe, but who (unless one could ticket them) do not answer quite so well for a fashionable party, as for a laboratory or a dissecting room. I was really, therefore, never more relieved, than when I found it was not a card for my soirée he wanted, but only my head, literally and truly my head;—that is, be it understood, when the commodity should no longer be of use to its owner. I readily gave him a post-obit on the only productive estate I ever possessed, delighted to save my “at home” even at so capital an expense.

It would, however, be a mistake, to accuse me of aristocratical leanings with respect to society. Something I must have—worth, wit, rank, fashion, beauty, notoriety, or an old friend. I will take even a diamond necklace, or an hussar suit of regimentals, value one hundred pounds, with, or without the wearer: but I do not want what musical cognoscenti call “perruque;” because I have no spare space to fill up, no corners to cram, like people who have large houses.

À propos to an untenanted uniform and an unappropriated necklace—by way of lion, I once hung up on the divisions of my bookcase a little tunic; and it made the frais of my party, by giving rise to an infinity of fun, and some philosophical, though humorous, conversation. On the previous morning, the most benevolent, amiable, and sanguine of all philanthropists called on me, with a countenance full of some new scheme of beneficence and utility. It was Mr. Owen, of New Lanark, whose visits are always welcome in Kildare-street, though so “few and far between.”

As soon as we had sunk into our arm-chairs, and put our feet on the fender, and before we had got on the usual topics of parallelograms and perfectibility, New Lanark and a new social system, he began,

“My dear Lady Morgan, you are to have a party to-night.”

“To be sure, my dear Mr. Owen, and one made expressly for yourself. You are my lion: I hope you don’t mean to jilt me.”

“By no means; but I have brought you a better lion than I could prove.”

“I doubt that; but who is he? where is he?”

“In my pocket.”

“You don’t say so: is it alive?”

“Here it is,” said Mr. Owen, smiling; and drawing forth a little parcel, he unfolded and held up a canvas tunic, or chemise, trimmed with red tape.

“I want you,” he added, “to assist me in bringing into fashion this true costume of nature’s dictation, the only one that man should wear.”

“But woman, my dear Mr. Owen?”

“Or woman either, my dear Lady.”

“Consider, Mr. Owen, the climate!”

“Your face does not suffer from it.”

“But then again, the decencies?”

“The decencies, as you call them, Lady M——, are conventional—they were not thought of some years ago, when you were all dressed in the adhesive draperies of antiquity, like that beautiful group on your chimney-piece. You see there the children of Niobe wore no more voluminous garments than my tunic;—that lovely child, for instance, which Niobe is endeavouring to save from the shafts of Apollo. And yet none of your fine gentlemen or ladies are shocked by the definition of forms, which have ever been the inspiration of art. I assure you I have already got several ladies to try this tunic on—”

“Oh! Mr. Owen!!!”

“On their little boys, Lady Morgan; and if I could only induce you to try it—”

“Me, my dear Mr. Owen! You surely cannot suppose—”

“I don’t ask you to wear it, Lady M——: all I beg for the present, is, that you will give it a trial, by showing it off at your party to-night—recommend it, puff it off!”

Quitte pour la peur, I promised to do so, to the utmost of my appraising abilities; and so we suspended the little chemise from the centre of my bookcase, under a bust of the Apollo.

“There!” said Mr. Owen, looking rapturously at the little model dress of future perfectibility, “there it is worthily placed! Such were the free vestments, that, leaving the limbs of the Greek athlete unrestrained, produced those noble forms, which supplied models for the Apollo of Belvedere.”

“It is certainly placed to great advantage, Mr. Owen,” I replied with a sigh, “but it gives my pretty library very much the look of Rag-fair, or a back parlour in Monmouth-street.”

“My dear Madam,” he replied, emphatically, “where the human race is to be benefitted, no sacrifice is too great.” And this sentiment, which is the governing principle of Mr. Owen’s life, may serve for his epigraph.

The little tunic, however, had a great success, and merited the well-known eulogium of Tam O’Shanter to a similar garment—