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"You will at least confess," replied the Count d'Erfeuil, "that there is one part of literature in which we have nothing to learn of any country. Our drama is decidedly the first in Europe; for I cannot believe that the English would presume to oppose their Shakespeare to us." "I beg your pardon," interrupted Mr Edgermond, "they have that presumption." And after this observation he was silent. "In that case I have nothing to say," continued the Count, with a smile which expressed a kind of civil contempt: "Each one may think as he pleases, but for my part I persist in believing that we may affirm without presumption that we are the very first in dramatic art. As to the Italians, if I may speak my mind freely, they do not appear even to suspect that there is a dramatic art in the world. With them the music is every thing, and the play itself nothing. Should the music of the second act of a piece be better than the first, they begin with the second act. Or, should a similar preference attach to the first acts of two different pieces, they will perform these two acts in the same evening, introducing between, perhaps, an act of some comedy in prose that contains irreproachable morality, but a moral teaching entirely composed of aphorisms, that even our ancestors have already cast off to the foreigner as too old to be of any service to them. Your poets are entirely at the disposal of your famous musicians; one declares that he cannot sing without there is in his air the word felicit
And even when affairs grow serious with the Baronet, and when, stricken by the palsy, he is loitering among the mountains of Styria, he writes, "I am glad to hear of your perfect restoration, and with health and the society of London, which you are so fitted to ornament and enjoy, your 'viva la felicit
"We'll put a head on him!" &c. All these expressions being interlarded with oaths and foul language, gave any but a pleasant prospect of what was to be looked for at the hands of these city roughs, who clambered nimbly on to the deck of the Felicit to inquire for my whereabouts.
Full of caprice, radiating the fire of genius, wayward and playful as a child, Maria Felicit
I rowed out of the canal on to the lake; but finding that the strong wind and rough waves were too much for my boat, I beat a hasty retreat into the port of refuge, and, securing my bow-line to a pile, and my stern-line to the bob-stay of a wood-schooner, the "Felicit," I prepared to ride out the gale under her bow. The skippers of the little fleet were very civil men.
I did not know this at the time, but as I looked cautiously around after the unwelcome guests had left, I saw a watchman standing on the forecastle of the Felicit, looking anxiously to the safety of the little white craft that by a slender cord held on to his vessel.
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