destiny as I was then enjoying. The women with whom I whispered were always arrayed in their utmost prodigality of charms; the men on whom I looked, were ever smiling; the flowers were in perpetual bloom; the dinners hot, the wines cold,-the slaveys full of alacrity the wheels of such a household as that of George the Fourth being greased with huile à la rose. : Moreover in spite of crows' feet, in the set in which I lived, I was still "handsome Cecil,"the pet, at five and thirty, of the old boys of sixty among whom I sauntered away my days. If a few grey hairs were perceptible, what would they have given to exchange their wigs for such a crop! If my waist were no longer trimly as in my early days of womanslaughter, what would they have given for the manly chest, enabling Meyer to dispense with twenty sheets of wadding in every coat! Yes! I was still an Apollo in that superannuated Olympus! I suppose I was a bad courtier, for I made no effort to conceal it. Sir John Harris, with a head of hair that might have served as an advertisement for the Macassar oil, was prudent enough to set up a Truefitt as stiff inbuckle as the mane of the lion over Northumberland House; and I even suspected him of getting up crows' feet with a camel's hair brush, like Farren when, in his boyhood, he made so inimitable a representative of Sir Peter Teazle. Sweet Sir John was now the very reflected image of the King!-But without intending any reflection, that which is good for Peter is not good for Paul, when Peter is Peter the Great ; and whenever John Harris bored one about shades of sherry,-made his nose red with - curaçoa, or exclaimed with Lear, "Pray you undo this button," after a surfeit of green peas at Christmas, others besides myself wished he had chosen another original for his mimicry. We often voted ourselves Harrissed to death! Even the King, I suspect, was disgusted with this worse half of his "double cherry seeming parted;"-" veluti in speculum" not being a satisfactory proposition, when the glass reflects nothing but deformity. What was wanted of a man in Harris's position, was rather the power of giving a fillip to the monotomy of royal seclusion. When the languor of declining years begins to oppress a prince, or the torpor of exhaustion a man who has lived too fast, unless capable of deriving amusement from books, or solace from THE book, he must à toute force be entertained. It does not suffice for him as for Cowper, "from the loopholes of retreat to gaze upon the stir” of the world. He requires an expert acoustician to bring its echoes nearer to his ear. The royal lion must have a decent jackall to fetch and carry news. It is strange how often we divert ourselves with talking about people whom we should consider it derogation to talk to,-and if Harris had understood how to make himself agreeable, he would have brought us every day some little chicken bone to pick of London tittle-tattle, instead of strutting about like a jay in borrowed plumes, or a Dublin Aide de Camp. For there really was a good deal to talk about in London, just then, for those great enough to delight in small talk. There were two or three young fellows of fortune come of age, who were pelting people with their guineas; and two or three of the prettiest creatures brightening the ball rooms, that ever played the Houri to Christian Turks. It was the very meridian hour of fashion,—and gorgeous enough for a coup de soleil. Nothing like emulation to quicken the human pulse!-How does the schoolboy's copy illustrate its capital E' s? "EMULATION ANIMATES MANKIND," ay, and womankind too! Half the brilliancy of that now disbanded regiment of the gay world called the Exclusives, was owing to the deter mination of proving to a consortless King, that, in the absence of a female Court, a tribunal might erect itself as illegal perhaps as that which tried and executed King Charles, but nearly as potent. People are beginning to forget the Exclusives; I believe because they were written out of fashion by a remarkably bad novel. But they were a curious tribe; and London society has never been half so condensed, and consequently half so brilliant, since their fortifications were thrown down, their brazen gates demolished, their fosses filled up. Their authority, by the way, arose out of the very un-English policy of centralization. For once, a handful of women acted in unison; and a new Thermopylæ accredited their prowess. nistration. Nothing like the energy of an opposition for making one aware of the strength of an admiIt was by the rancour of the Excluded that I understood the power of these Exclusives for Mariana was of the opposition! |