"Even the imperious Mr.Delvile was more supportable here than in London.Secure in his own castle, he looked round him with a pride of power and possession which softened while it swelled him.His superiority was undisputed: his will was without control.He was not, as in the great capital of the kingdom, surrounded by competitors.No rivalry disturbed his peace; no equality mortified his greatness.All he saw were either vassals of his power, or guests bending to his pleasure.He abated, therefore, considerably tile stern gloom of his haughtiness, and soothed his proud mind by the courtesy of condescension."We will stake our reputation for critical sagacity on this, that no such paragraph as that which we have last quoted, can be found in any of Madame D'Arblay's works except Cecilia.Compare with it the following sample of her later style.
"If beneficence be judged by the happiness which it diffuses, whose claim, by that proof, shall stand higher than that of Mrs.
Montagu, from the munificence with which she celebrated her annual festival for those hapless artificers who perform the most abject offices, of any authorised calling, in being the active guardians of our blazing hearths? Not to vainglory, then, but to kindness of heart, should be adjudged the publicity of that superb charity which made its jetty objects, for one bright morning, cease to consider themselves as degraded outcasts from all society."We add one or two shorter samples.Sheridan refused to permit his lovely wife to sing in public, and was warmly praised on this account by Johnson.
"The last of men," says Madame D'Arblay, "was Doctor Johnson to have abetted squandering the delicacy of integrity by nullifying the labours of talents."The Club, Johnson's Club, did itself no honour by rejecting on political grounds two distinguished men, one a Tory, the other a Whig.Madame D'Arblay tells the story thus: "A similar ebullition of political rancour with that which so difficultly had been conquered for Mr.Canning foamed over the ballot box to the exclusion of Mr.Rogers."An offence punishable with imprisonment is, in this language, an offence "which produces incarceration." To be starved to death is "to sink from inanition into nonentity." Sir Isaac Newton is "the developer of the skies in their embodied movements"; and Mrs.
Thrale, when a party of clever people sat silent, is said to have been "provoked by the dulness of a taciturnity that, in the midst of such renowned interlocutors, produced as narcotic a torpor as could have been caused by a dearth the most barren of all human faculties." In truth, it is impossible to look at any page of Madame D'Arblay's later works without finding flowers of rhetoric like these.Nothing in the language of those jargonists at whom Mr.Gosport laughed, nothing in the language of Sir Sedley Clarendel, approaches this new Euphuism.
