d,
and a tolerant philosophy of the sage in the world recurrently the
keynote.

Once only had Diana to protect her nurseling. He cited a funny line
from a recent popular volume of verse, in perfect A propos, looking at
Sullivan Smith; who replied, that the poets had become too many for
him, and he read none now. Diana said: 'There are many Alexanders, but
Alexander of Macedon is not dwarfed by the number.' She gave him an
opening for a smarter reply, but he lost it in a comment--against
Whitmonby's cardinal rule: 'The neatest turn of the wrist that ever
swung a hero to crack a crown!' and he bowed to young Rhodes: 'I 'll
read your versicler to-morrow morning early.' The latter expressed a
fear that the hour was too critical for poetry.

'I have taken the dose at a very early hour,' said Whitmonby, to bring
conversation to the flow again, 'and it effaced the critical mind
completely.'

'But did not silence the critical nose,' observed Westlake.

Wilmers named the owner of the longest nose in Europe.

'Potentially, indeed a critic!' said Diana.

'Nights beside it must be fearful, and good matter for a divorce, if
the poor dear lady could hale it to the doors of the Vatican!' Sullivan
Smith exclaimed. 'But there's character in noses.'

'Calculable by inches?' Dacier asked.

'More than in any other feature,' said Lady Dunstane. 'The Riffords are
all prodigiously gifted and amusing: suspendens omnia naso. It should be
prayed for in families.'

'Totum ut to faciant, Fabulle, nasum,' rejoined Whitmonby. 'Lady
Isabella was reading the tale of the German princess, who had a sentinel
stationed some hundred yards away to whisk off the flies, and she owned
to me that her hand instinctively travelled upward.'

'Candour is the best concealment, when one has to carry a saddle of
absurdity,' said Diana. 'Touchstone's "poor thing, but mine own," is
godlike in its enveloping fold.'

'The most comforting sermon ever delivered on property in poverty,' said
Arthur Rhodes.

Westlake assented. 'His choice of Audrey strikes me as an exhibition of
the sure instinct for pasture of the philosophical jester in a forest.'

'With nature's woman, if he can find her, the urban seems equally at
home,' said Lady Dunstane.

'Baron Pawle is an example,' added Whitmonby. 'His cook is a pattern
wife to him. I heard him say at table that she was responsible for all
except the wines. "I wouldn't have them on my conscience, with a Judge!"
my