The Argosy — page 159: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

eee Old-New Fokes. 145 more than we should have felt or said in the old days.” Something like this is told of blind old Madame de Deffand and a friend “with the sightless orbs ;” and there is a French (alleged) origin to many of our good stories. The question is not what date is assigned to an old story now, but what is the date of the oldest recorded edition of the story. Only the other day some praise was given to a dissenting preacher for inventing such a happy word (infelicitously called so) as ‘“‘ingemination ;” but the readers of Horace Walpole know that the word was used by him in his letters, and they probably think that it has no more claim to be admitted into the English language than the “anfractuosities”” of Dr. Johnson. Some stories, doubtless, repeat themselves accidentally. There is one of an old French duke who used nightly to visit an old French countess to play picquet with her, but he found this so inconvenient in winter, as he had to return home, that he proposed marniage, in order that he might decently stay. What is told of him subsequently is remarkably like the following story in “ Richardsoniana: ”"—“ Very often the faste of perpetually running after diversions is not a mark of any pleasure taken in them, but of none taken in ourselves. This sally- ing abroad is only from uneasiness at home, which is-in every one’s self. Like a gentieman who, overlooking them at White’s, at piquet, till three or four in the morning, on a dispute, they referred to him. When he protested that he ‘knew nothing of the game,’ ‘Zounds!’ say they, ‘and sit here till this time?’ ‘Gentlemen, I’m married!’ ‘Oh, sir, we beg pardon !’” It was so with the French duke: he married that he might stay at home ; and it was just then he discovered that he could not abandon his old habit of going out, and accordingly he stayed abroad late because he happened to be married. Pe gums Sl a ~ —_~P gg 27 &. @-y>> comicaooks GO)