Vengeance! Vengeance! Monsieur Leon has triumph’d once, but he shall not again; and we are happy to find that, however, either he or other causes may have stolen our gentlemen from us one Attic Evening. He is at least unable to rob us of the literary exertions of our members. We remember in our young days to have read a fable of a lark who built her nest in a corn field, and when her young one told her that the master had sent his son to beg assistance from his neighbours and friends, to gather in the harvest, she laugh’d at their fears, and said he was more ready to ask than they would be to come: but when the Master himself began to cut the corn, she thought it prudent to decamp. So is it with one of our Attic Bards. He has been advertising and setting all his friends to work for the last three months, to recover his Lost Muse, but in vain — for if they found her, they kept her to themselves. But now that he has magnanimously resolved to undertake the quest himself, we hope she will make her reappearance — but Alas! not till the end of the Season; and then if he be not more careful he will lose her again before the next, and we must be under the necessity of passing a vote of censure in the meantime.
We consider the Complaint of Mr John Bull to be, as he calls it, a sensible one; and even acknowledge ourselves to have been partially bit with the Gallomania he so feelingly deprecates; yet when the Comte Leander and other foreigners of distinction are attracted by the fame of the Attic Chest, it would be churlish and perhaps impolite to refuse them admittance. The attempt at writing in a foreign language is certainly the best means of keeping up the habit of writing and thinking in it with fluency; and we were not aware that our Society contained any such complete Englishmen as Mr Bull, whose blundering attempts at French have afforded us a hearty laugh.
We have another complaint on the same subject from Love and the Graces! Which has more surprised us, for if we may believe our foreign neighbours in this, as in every other case distinguish’d for compliment, they are celestial beings never seen on this side of the Channel. Yet notwithstanding these double adversaries we cannot let the gallant Blondel sigh unpitied by his bewitching Decima — who in return for so delectable and effusion, will we hope take up a needle and thread to mend the rents her cruelty has occasioned in his heart — or elsewhere.
The Tragedy of Allah Ul Dien we hope to complete this evening. The fair Lavinia has sent us a long but very interesting account of Reims and Soissons, and we have a very beautiful address from our long lost Atticus Scriblerus to our favourite Lady Olivia, followed by a very elegant tale — but will the gentle Rodelinda look on it so kindly as we do?
Some of our members have been idle. We will not shame them to their faces; but
“Let the stricken deer go weep.”
and may their tears be such pearls as the poets of Persia string together when they sing the sorrows of unhappy lovers — such as we may be proud to preserve as precious relics on our shrine of song.