Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/65

 Rh ," says the judicious Miss Smith with a smirk of self-commendation; and poor Miss Matty—the cap being bought—has to bow to this arbiter of fate. How much we all suffer in life from the discretion of our families and friends!

Thackeray laughed the dim ghost of "Lalla Rookh" out of England. He mocked at the turbans, and at the old ladies who wore them; at the vapid love songs, and at the young ladies who sang them.

He derided the "breathing odours of Araby," and the Eastern travellers who imported this exotic atmosphere into Grosvenor Square. Yonng [sic] Bedwin Sands, who has "lived under tents," who has published a quarto, ornamented with his own portrait in various oriental costumes, and who goes about accompanied by a black servant of most unprepossessing appearance, "just like another Brian de Bois Guilbert," is only a degree less ridiculous than Clarence Bulbul, who gives Miss Tokely a piece of the sack in which an indiscreet Zuleika was