MRS. TROLLOPE'S BLUE BELLES.
"THE Blue Belles of May Fair" is the proper title for this smart satire of the lionizing coteries in the fashionable world ; for though not professing to penetrate into the highest regions where blue belles are indigenous, Mrs. TROLLOPE confines her cullings to those elevated spots bordering on the circle of aristocratic exclusiveness. The vanity of the worshipers who offer the incense of their adulation to the idol of the hour, and the sickly cant that passes with them for oracular profundity, are cleverly ridiculed ; and if flippancy and caricature are allowable at all, it is doubtless in dealing with such flimsy inanities as pet poetasters and lady lion-hunters. The affectations and impertinences of the mob of fashionables who crowd this vanity fair of which talent, or it may be genius, is the merry-andrew, come in but for a share of Mrs. Taca.LorE's sarcasm : its chief object is a managing mamma, whose manceuvres constitute the web of the plot. This is Mrs. Hartley, the chaperon of the heroine ; who adroitly makes the beauty and fortune of her protegee serve as a lure for suitors to her three marriageable girls. Mrs. Hartley and her husbandhunting daughter Margaretta, and the bragging baronet Sir James Ridley, whom that designing young lady trepans into marriage, are the hest-drawn characters in the novel. In the anatomizing of baser natures Mrs. TROLLOPE is skilful and diverting, though the amusement is of a disagreeable kind. The heroine, Constance Ridley, dazzled by the brilliancy of Henry Mortimer, a sublime coxcomb, the evening-star of the season in fashionable drawingrooms, narrowly escapes being added to the list of victims whom this Apollo lady-killer sacrifices to his self-love : luckily she recovers her senses in time to perceive the superior merits of a paragon of men, who only waits for her disenchantment to press his suit. Mr. Mortimer, the male coquette, and his confidential friend, Mrs. Gardener Stewart, who laps the Sybarite in a sensual elysium, are painted with the minute details of miniature-portraits. The business both of love-making and match-making is tedious ; and when the fate of the heroine alone engages the attention, the interest, such as it is, flags : the novel is not so much a story, as a series of broad and somewhat coarse sketches. All the persons introduced are in the habit of interlarding their conversation with French and Italian phrases; an absurdity that Mrs. TROLLOPE vainly attempts to lessen by burlesquing this affectation of her own, in the instance of Mr. William Weston.
We quote by way of sample a scene of
SENTIMENTAL FLIRTATION.
There was no individual in London—perhaps none in the world—to whom Henry 'Mortimer had so frequently opened his heart as to Mrs. Gardener Stewart. The sort of refined celebrity he had attained in the library, the
boudoir, the drawing-room, and the dining-room, and which had in it nothing in common with the vulgar universal-suffrage sort of popularity which would
rather have appalled than attracted her, rendered every word he confidentially addressed to her soothing to her feelings and precious to her heart. Mortimer knew this, and therefore poured forth before her, without scruple or reserve, the perpetually renewed stream of love, which, though inspired by others, was often more elegantly dilated upon to her than to them ; for Mr. Mortimer's tender passions were, for the most part, speculative, and led him to find conso • lation, and almost happiness, in distant sighings; which, to lovers less poetical, might have been considered as extremely uninteresting.
"Dear friend," said the lady, as soon as the drawing-room door was closed upon them, and he was near enough to receive and salute the delicate little band extended to welcome him ; "dear friend! was I not thinking of you ? I felt certain you would come to me to-day. I have been reading a delicious book, a French translation from the German. It is upon the language of flowers. You have touched upon that, you know; and, oh ! how beautifully!"
"You remember those lines?" said Mr. Mortimer, with an affectionate "and, oh how partially!"
These words were spoken in playful imitation of bee own silver tones ; and then be added, "I dare say you remember them better than I do myself. I wish you would let me hear you repeat them." "However well her memory might have been able to serve her, it seemed that Mrs. Gardener Stewart did not choose to trust to it ; for, shaking her head, she pointed to a set of gorgeously-bound morocco volumes, which Mr. Mortimer knew pretty well by sight, saying, "You shall hear it, amico ; willingly will I let you hear it from the lips of your friend; but it must not be garbled. Any doubt between a yet or a but, any inaccuracy even in the position of a comma, would destroy its perfection : for it LI perfect, Mr. Mortimer; not even yourself, carping critic as you are, can deny that." The poet obeyed the signal thus given, and placed in her hand the volume which contained the lines "touching," as she had said, "on the language of flowers." As she opened the book almost exactly at the page she sought for, she nodded and smiled expressively, as much as to say, "Do I not know my way about it?" She then read the lines, in a salt, sweet, low voice, that her auditor, at that moment, thought peculiarly delightful. The little poem was one of those sadly sweet compositions which reach the heart, not only through the ears, but by the ears. Every word, either in itself or by its juxtaposition, was euphonons; every cadence produced on the sense the satisfactory effect of a key-note clearly touched; and the construction of the stanza seemed, at every repetition, to increase in harmony, till poetry became so lulled
" By the sounds herself had made."
that she suffered their music almost to overwhelm her.
But if this were a defect, the author and the reader felt it not ; the former sighed, the latter dropped a tear, and both for a few moments remained perfectly silent.
Among the multitude of little charms which constituted altogether the delightful whole of Mrs. Gardener Stewart's pregminent "sweetness," the interesting vicinity of her tears to her gentle-looking gray eyes ought not to be overlooked. It would be highly unjust, however, to suppose that she ever affected, or even contrived to weep, when her sensibilities were untouched. There was no need of any such paltry device to complete the perfection of her beautiful character; the tears of Mrs. Gardener Stewart were always genuine, every thing touched her.
This being the case, she was, of course, perpetually called upon "not to give way to her feelings"; and now, as often heretofore, Mr. Mortimer withdrew the pretty volume from her hand, and said, in that peculiar accent of reproach which the most touchingly expresses approbation, " This,must not be, I will not suffer it."
Mrs. Gardener Stewart raised to his face the eyes which had so often looked at him before through the same soft mist; but she did not speak—she never did speak her feelings—and it is therefore natural to suppose that they were "too strong for words." It would be difficult to describe intelligibly, to any one who had not seen it, how Mrs. Gardener Stewart wept. Frequent as was the effusion, it but rarely happened that more than one single pearl-drop overflowed the large chalice which benignant nature had prepared for its receptacle: hence the correctness of the classic phrase is fully proved, "A tear bedews my Delia's eye." But though she shed but few, she yielded many ; for sometimes for whole minutes together she would gaze upon the friend who caused or shared her sensibility, with the said chalice, or rather a pair of them, full to the brim, though never overflowing : and Mr. Mortimer, in attempting once to describe this beautiful phsenomenon, said that she looked like a Hebe attending 011 musical Apollo—not on burly Jove—and ministering to the thirst of the soul; for, while thus meekly holding up those fall cups of azure crystal to a poet, she offered him a draught worth a whole ocean of nectar.
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