1830.] Affairs in General 335 



speaks of his parents : " I inherited from my father a certain sort of 

 eloquence, calculated to enforce my doctrines to my auditors ; from my 

 mother I derived the faculty of representing all that the imagination can 

 conceive, with energy and vivacity." Lord Erskines mother was a 

 woman of superior talent and discernment; by her advice, her son 

 betook himself to the bar. Thomson ; Mrs. Thomson was a woman of 

 uncommon natural endowments, with a warmth and vivacity of imagina- 

 tion scarcely inferior to her son. Boerhaave's mother acquired a high 

 knowledge of medicine. Sir Walter Scott; His mother, Elizabeth, 

 daughter of D. Rutherford, W. S., was a woman of accomplishment. 

 She had a good taste for, and wrote poetry, which appeared in print 

 in 1789. Napoleons father was a man of no peculiar mind ; but his 

 mother was distinguished for her understanding. Lord Morninglon, 

 the father of the Wellesleys, was an excellent musician, and no more, 

 but his lady was remarkable for her intellectual superiority. The 

 father of the Emmetts, in Ireland, was a babbler, but the mother was a 

 singularly intelligent person. The fate of two of her sons was unhappy, 

 from their republicanism, but the three were possessed of the most strik- 

 ing abilities. Sheridan s father was a weak creature, as his whole career 

 showed; the genius descended from the mother. Young Napoleon is the 

 son not of his father's mind, but of Maria Louisa's he is an Austrian. 



The moral to be drawn from all this is, if men desire to have clever 

 sons, let them marry clever women. But the experiment may be peri- 

 lous for the present time ; and if they wish to lead quiet lives, they may 

 perhaps better let it alone. 



The burning of the Argyll Rooms has deprived Welch of the prospect 

 of a showy season. Some Frenchmen, who are now the chief arbiters 

 in these matters of elegance, had constructed a series of soirees, which 

 were to be ultra- elegant, and more than ultra-exclusive. Private rooms 

 were to be provided, and fashionable luxury was to be ministered to the 

 peerage. Nothing under a coronet was to luxuriate in this paradise, and 

 Almack's was to deplore its faded supremacy. But what are the fates 

 of human fancy ? A few ashes from a stove (such is one of the stories), 

 " set their face," as a great law orator would say, against the brains of 

 Welch and his Frenchman; and in half an hour flew up into smoke and 

 cinders the fruit of the contemplations of so many men of genius. 



The rooms were, by universal acknowledgment, the most graceless 

 specimen of building in the kingdom ; cold to sit in, difficult to see in, 

 and impossible to hear in. They were built in the year 1819, by a 

 committee of amateurs, under the superintendance of Mr. Wyatt, the 

 architect. The committee, from some cause, did not succeed in their 

 speculation, which subsequently rendered it necessary for them to sell 

 the building. The magnificent improvement which has taken place at 

 the west-end of the town, induced the Commissioners of Woods and 

 Forests to become the purchasers, and they afterwards let the building 

 to Welch, at a rent of 700/. per annum. To avoid payment of the 

 Assessed Taxes, no person slept on the premises. We hope that when- 

 ever they are rebuilt, the first stipulation will be, that they shall not 

 bear the slightest possible resemblance to any thing that they ever were 

 before. To rebuild them would be easy, for they would be a mere 

 shell. And we think that Beazley, the best architect of those transitory 

 fabrics, for nine or ten thousand pounds, would shoot up pavilions and 



