was a friendly dinner-party at the house of a
gentleman called Doncastle, who lived in a moderately fashionable square
of west London. All the friends and relatives present were nice people,
who exhibited becoming signs of pleasure and gaiety at being there; but
as regards the vigour with which these emotions were expressed, it may be
stated that a slight laugh from far down the throat and a slight
narrowing of the eye were equivalent as indices of the degree of mirth
felt to a Ha-ha-ha! and a shaking of the shoulders among the minor
traders of the kingdom; and to a Ho-ho-ho! contorted features, purple
face, and stamping foot among the gentlemen in corduroy and fustian who
adorn the remoter provinces.

The conversation was chiefly about a volume of musical, tender, and
humorous rhapsodies lately issued to the world in the guise of verse,
which had been reviewed and talked about everywhere. This topic,
beginning as a private dialogue between a young painter named Ladywell
and the lady on his right hand, had enlarged its ground by degrees, as a
subject will extend on those rare occasions when it happens to be one
about which each person has thought something beforehand, instead of, as
in the natural order of things, one to which the oblivious listener
replies mechanically, with earnest features, but with thoughts far away.
And so the whole table made the matter a thing to inquire or reply upon
at once, and isolated rills of other chat died out like a river in the
sands.

'Witty things, and occasionally Anacreontic: and they have the
originality which such a style must naturally possess when carried out by
a feminine hand,' said Ladywell.

'If it is a feminine hand,' said a man near.

Ladywell looked as if he sometimes knew secrets, though he did not wish
to boast.

'Written, I presume you mean, in the Anacreontic measure of three feet
and a half--spondees and iambics?' said a gentleman in spectacles,
glancing round, and giving emphasis to his inquiry by causing bland
glares of a circular shape to proceed from his glasses towards the person
interrogated.

The company appeared willing to give consideration to the words of a man
who knew such things as that, and hung forward to listen. But Ladywell
stopped the whole current of affairs in that direction by saying--

'O no; I was speaking rather of the matter and tone. In fact, the Seven
Days' Review said they were Anacreontic, you know; and so they are--any
one