He will tell you that he is in general request--that the difficulty is to know where not to go:
'So odd you should happen to meet him; So strange, as he's just passing through.'
The Season may be said to go to its grave with parting volleys from the sportsmen on the moors. One is fired on 'the Twelfth,' the other on 'the First.' The one is associated with grouse, the other with partridges. And Haynes Bayly makes his fashionable matron only too conscious of these facts. 'Don't talk of September,' she says; 'a lady
'Must think it of all months the worst; The men are preparing already To take themselves off on the First.'
'Last month, their attention to quicken, A supper I knew was the thing; But now, from my turkey and chicken, They're tempted by birds on the wing! They shoulder their terrible rifles ('Tis really too much for my nerves!) And, slighting my sweets and my trifles, Prefer my Lord Harry's preserves!'
'Oh, marriage is hard of digestion, The men are all sparing of words; And now 'stead of popping the question, They set off to pop at the birds.'
Life at English country houses has been depicted by more than one poet. Pope, for instance, tells us what happened when Miss Blount left town--how
'She went, to plain-work, and to purling brooks, Old-fashion'd halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks... (To) divert her eyes with pictures in the fire, Hum half a tune, tell stories to the squire.'
Lord Lyttelton's 'beauty in the country' complains that
'Now with mamma at tedious whist I play, Now without scandal drink insipid tea;'
while Lady Mary Montagu's 'bride in the country' deplores the fact that she is
'Left in the lurch, Forgot and secluded from view, Unless when some bumpkin at church Stares wistfully over the pew.'
Agreeably descriptive of rural pleasures is Lord Chesterfield's 'Advice to a Lady in Autumn.' Of recent years the subject has been treated by a versifier who has at least a measure of the neatness of Praed, and who enumerates among the typical guests at a country house
'A sporting parson, good at whist, A preaching sportsman, good at gateways;'
'A lady who once wrote a book, And one of whom a book's been written... One blonde whose fortune is her face, And one whose face caught her a fortune.'