Page:The Spirit of the Age.djvu/406

398 Post-bag." These are essences, are "nests of spicery," bitter and sweet, honey and gall together. No one can so well describe the set speech of a dull formalist, or the flowing locks of a Dowager,

His light, agreeable, polished style pierces through the body of the court—hits off the faded graces of "an Adonis of fifty," weighs the vanity of fashion in tremulous scales, mimics the grimace of affectation and folly, shews up the littleness of the great, and spears a phalanx of statesmen with its glittering point as with a diamond broach.