Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/141

 Rh person, "equally competent to form the minds and manners of the daughters of a nobleman, and to reform the simple but idle habits of the peasantry"; and Mrs. Bennet, whose letters—so Miss Seward tells us—"breathed Ciceronean spirit and eloquence," and whose poems revealed "the terse neatness, humour, and gayety of Swift," which makes it doubly distressful that neither letters nor poems have survived. Above all, there was the mysterious "Sylph," who glides—sylphlike—through a misty atmosphere of conjecture and adulation; and about whom we feel some of the fond solicitude expressed over and over again by the letter-writers of this engaging period.

Translated into prose, the Sylph becomes Mrs. Agmondesham Vesey,—

a fatuous deaf lady, with a taste for literary society, and a talent for arranging chairs. She it was who first gathered the "Blues" together, placing them in little groups—generally back to back—and flitting so rapidly from one group to another, her ear-trumpet hung around her neck, that she never heard