Wit and wisdom Author:Benjamin Disraeli Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Blue-stocking. Lady Joan Fitz-Warene only required a listener ; she did not make inquiries like Lady Maud, or impart her own impressions by suggesting them as... more » your own. Lady Joan gave Egremont an account of the Aztec cities, of which she had been reading that morning, and of the several historical theories which their discovery had suggested ; then she imparted her own, which differed from all, but which seemed clearly the right one. Mexico led to Egypt. Lady Joan was as familiar with the Pharaohs as with the Caciques of the New World. The phonetic system was despatched by the way. Then came Champollion ; then Paris ; then all its celebrities, literary and especially scientific; then came the letter from Arago received that morning ; and the letter from Dr. Buckland expected to-morrow. She was delighted that one had written; wondered why the other had not. Finally, before the ladies had retired, she had invited Egremont to join Lady Marney in a visit to her observatory, where they were to behold a comet which she had been the first to detect.—Sybil. Bl Ush. Blushing like a Worcestershire orchard before harvest.— Endymion. BOLINGBROKE. No one was better qualified to be the minister of a free and powerful nation than Henry St. John, and destiny at first appeared to combine with nature in the elevation of his fortunes. Opposed to the Whigs from principle, for an oligarchy is hostile to genius, and recoiling from the Tory tenets, which his unprejudiced and vigorous mind taught him at the same time to dread and contemn, Lord Boling- broke at the outset of his career incurred the commonplace imputation of insincerity and inconsistency because in an age of unsettled parties with principles contradictory of theirconduct, he maintained that vigilant and meditative independen...« less