Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/78

60 great family hearth, with its immense burthen of blazing wood casting a broad and merry glare over the congregated household and the numerous retainers, a social winter party in Virginia affords a tolerable picture of feudal munificence.

Frank Meriwether is a good specimen of the class I have described. He seeks companionship with men of ability, and is a zealous disseminator of the personal fame of individuals who have won any portion of renown in the state. Sometimes I even think he exaggerates a little, when descanting upon the prodigies of genius that have been reared in the Old Dominion; and he manifestly seems to consider that a young man who has astonished a whole village in Virginia by the splendor of his talents must, of course, be known throughout the United States; for he frequently opens his eyes at me with an air of astonishment when I happen to ask him who is the marvel he is speaking of.

I observe, moreover, that he has a constitutional fondness for paradoxes and does not scruple to adopt and republish any apothegm that is calculated to startle one by its novelty. He has a correspondence with several old friends who were with him at college, and who have now risen into an extensive political notoriety in the state; these gentlemen furnish him with many new currents of thought, along which he glides with a happy velocity. He is essentially meditative in his character and somewhat given to declamation; and these traits have communicated a certain measured and deliberate gesticulation to his discourse. I have frequently seen him after dinner stride backward and forward across the room for some moments, wrapped in thought, and then fling himself upon the sofa and come out with some weighty doubt, expressed with a solemn emphasis. In this form he lately began a conversation, or rather a speech, that for a moment quite disconcerted me. "After all," said he, as if he had been talking to me before,