Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/98

Rh antiques in the Kingdom, but I had no opportunity of judging or enjoying, for the marble divinities were hidden by the glittering mortals. When K. and I entered, the apartments were filled with some hundreds of people of the first station and fashion in the land; luxuriously dressed and sparkling with diamonds, a sea of faces as strange as their diamonds to me. It was an overpowering kind of solitude. Lady L. had politely directed me to a favourable position, and I slunk into the first vacant place I could find, where I was beginning to feel quite comfortable in my obscurity, when K. said to me, with something of the feeling of Columbus' men when they first cried "land!" "there is Mr. —— and Mr. ——!" These gentlemen soon after made their way to us, and dissipated our forlornness. In the course of the evening we met many agreeable persons to whom we had been before introduced, and several of the most noted lions of the London menagerie were pointed out to us, Bulwer, Taylor, and Talfourd. Lady Seymour was there, a superb beauty certainly, and well entitled to the elective crown she is to wear, of Queen of Love and Beauty. I was introduced to Mrs. Norton, who is herself a most queenly-looking creature, a Semiramis, a Sappho, or an Amazon (the Greek ideal Amazon, remember, uniting masculine force, with feminine delicacy, or anything that expresses the perfection of intellectual and physical beauty). There is another of these Sheridan sisters celebrated for her personal charms. I had read but a few mornings before, as I mentioned