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Title:  The Fitz-Boodle Papers

Author:  William Makepeace Thackeray

September, 2001  [Etext #2823]


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THE FITZ-BOODLE PAPERS.

by William Makepeace Thackeray




CONTENTS


THE FITZ-BOODLE PAPERS.


FITZ-BOODLE'S CONFESSIONS:--

  Preface

  Dorothea

  Ottilia


FITZ-BOODLE'S PROFESSIONS:--

  First Profession

  Second Profession




FITZ-BOODLE'S CONFESSIONS.*


PREFACE.

GEORGE FITZ-BOODLE, ESQUIRE, TO OLIVER YORKE, ESQUIRE.


OMNIUM CLUB, May 20, 1842.


DEAR SIR,--I have always been considered the third-best whist-
player in Europe, and (though never betting more than five pounds)
have for many years past added considerably to my yearly income by
my skill in the game, until the commencement of the present season,
when a French gentleman, Monsieur Lalouette, was admitted to the
club where I usually play.  His skill and reputation were so great,
that no men of the club were inclined to play against us two of a
side; and the consequence has been, that we have been in a manner
pitted against one another.  By a strange turn of luck (for I
cannot admit the idea of his superiority), Fortune, since the
Frenchman's arrival, has been almost constantly against me, and I
have lost two-and-thirty nights in the course of a couple of score
of nights' play.


* The "Fitz-Boodle Papers" first appeared in Fraser's Magazine for
the year 1842.


Everybody knows that I am a poor man; and so much has Lalouette's
luck drained my finances, that only last week I was obliged to give
him that famous gray cob on which you have seen me riding in the
Park (I can't afford a thoroughbred, and hate a cocktail),--I was,
I say, forced to give him up my cob in exchange for four ponies
which I owed him.  Thus, as I never walk, being a heavy man whom
nobody cares to mount, my time hangs heavily on my hands; and, as I
hate home, or that apology for it--a bachelor's lodgings--and as I
have nothing earthly to do now until I can afford to purchase
another horse, I spend my time in sauntering from one club to
another, passing many rather listless hours in them before the men
come in.

You will say, Why not take to backgammon, or ecarte, or amuse
yourself with a book?  Sir (putting out of the question the fact
that I do not play upon credit), I make a point never to play
before candles are lighted; and as for books, I must candidly
confess to you I am not a reading man.

'Twas but the other day that some one recommended me to your
Magazine after dinner, saying it contained an exceedingly witty
article upon--I forget what.  I give you my honor, sir, that I took
up the work at six, meaning to amuse myself till seven, when Lord
Trumpington's dinner was to come off, and egad! in two minutes I
fell asleep, and never woke till midnight.  Nobody ever thought of
looking for me in the library, where nobody ever goes; and so
ravenously hungry was I, that I was obliged to walk off to
Crockford's for supper.

What is it that makes you literary persons so stupid?  I have met
various individuals in society who I was told were writers of
books, and that sort of thing, and expecting rather to be amused by
their conversation, have invariably found them dull to a degree,
and as for information, without a particle of it.  Sir, I actually
asked one of these fellows, "What was the nick to seven?" and he
stared in my face and said he didn't know.  He was hugely over-
dressed in satin, rings, chains and so forth; and at the beginning
of dinner was disposed to be rather talkative and pert; but my
little sally silenced HIM, I promise you, and got up a good laugh
at his expense too.  "Leave George alone," said little Lord
Cinqbars, "I warrant he'll be a match for any of you literary
fellows."  Cinqbars is no great wiseacre; but, indeed, it requires
no great wiseacre to know THAT.

What is the simple deduction to be drawn from this truth?  Why,
this--that a man to be amusing and well-informed, has no need of
books at all, and had much better go to the world and to men for
his knowledge.  There was Ulysses, now, the Greek fellow engaged in
the Trojan war, as I dare say you know; well, he was the cleverest
man possible, and how?  From having seen men and cities, their
manners noted and their realms surveyed, to be sure.  So have I.
I have been in every capital, and can order a dinner in every
language in Europe.

My notion, then, is this.  I have a great deal of spare time on my
hands, and as I am told you pay a handsome sum to persons writing
for you, I will furnish you occasionally with some of my views upon
men and things; occasional histories of my acquaintance, which I
think may amuse you; personal narratives of my own; essays, and
what not.  I am told that I do not spell correctly.  This of course
I don't know; but you will remember that Richelieu and Marlborough
could not spell, and egad! I am an honest man, and desire to be no
better than they.  I know that it is the matter, and not the
manner, which is of importance.  Have the goodness, then, to let
one of your understrappers correct the spelling and the grammar of
my papers; and you can give him a few shillings in my name for his
trouble.

Begging you to accept the assurance of my high consideration, I am,
sir,

Your obedient servant,

GEORGE SAVAGE FITZ-BOODLE.

P.S.--By the way, I have said in my letter that I found ALL
literary persons vulgar and dull.  Permit me to contradict this
with regard to yourself.  I met you once at Blackwall, I think it
was, and really did not remark anything offensive in your accent or
appearance.


Before commencing the series of moral disquisitions, &c. which I
intend, the reader may as well know who I am, and what my past
course of life has been.  To say that I am a Fitz-Boodle is to say
at once that I am a gentleman.  Our family has held the estate of
Boodle ever since the reign of Henry II.; and it is out of no ill
will to my elder brother, or unnatural desire for his death, but
only because the estate is a very good one, that I wish heartily it
was mine: I would say as much of Chatsworth or Eaton Hall.

I am not, in the first place, what is called a ladies' man, having
contracted an irrepressible habit of smoking after dinner, which
has obliged me to give up a great deal of the dear creatures'
society; nor can I go much to country-houses for the same reason.
Say what they will, ladies do not like you to smoke in their
bedrooms: their silly little noses scent out the odor upon the
chintz, weeks after you have left them.  Sir John has been caught
coming to bed particularly merry and redolent of cigar-smoke; young
George, from Eton, was absolutely found in the little green-house
puffing an Havana; and when discovered they both lay the blame upon
Fitz-Boodle.  "It was Mr. Fitz-Boodle, mamma," says George, "who
offered me the cigar, and I did not like to refuse him."  "That
rascal Fitz seduced us, my dear," says Sir John, "and kept us
laughing until past midnight."  Her ladyship instantly sets me down
as a person to be avoided.  "George," whispers she to her boy,
"promise me on your honor, when you go to town, not to know that
man."  And when she enters the breakfast-room for prayers, the
first greeting is a peculiar expression of countenance, and
inhaling of breath, by which my lady indicates the presence of some
exceedingly disagreeable odor in the room.  She makes you the
faintest of curtsies, and regards you, if not with a "flashing
eye," as in the novels, at least with a "distended nostril."
During the whole of the service, her heart is filled with the
blackest gall towards you; and she is thinking about the best means
of getting you out of the house.

What is this smoking that it should be considered a crime?  I
believe in my heart that women are jealous of it, as of a rival.
They speak of it as of some secret, awful vice that seizes upon a
man, and makes him a pariah from genteel society.  I would lay a
guinea that many a lady who has just been kind enough to rend the
above lines lays down the book, after this confession of mine that
I am a smoker, and says, "Oh, the vulgar wretch!" and passes on to
something else.

The fact is, that the cigar IS a rival to the ladies, and their
conqueror too.  In the chief pipe-smoking nations they are kept in
subjection.  While the chief, Little White Belt, smokes, the women
are silent in his wigwam; while Mahomet Ben Jawbrahim causes
volumes of odorous incense of Latakia to play round his beard, the
women of the harem do not disturb his meditations, but only add to
the delight of them by tinkling on a dulcimer and dancing before
him.  When Professor Strumpff of Gottingen takes down No. 13 from
the wall, with a picture of Beatrice Cenci upon it, and which holds
a pound of canaster, the Frau Professorin knows that for two hours
Hermann is engaged, and takes up her stockings and knits in quiet.
The constitution of French society has been quite changed within
the last twelve years: an ancient and respectable dynasty has been
overthrown; an aristocracy which Napoleon could never master has
disappeared: and from what cause?  I do not hesitate to say,--FROM
THE HABIT OF SMOKING.  Ask any man whether, five years before the
revolution of July, if you wanted a cigar at Paris, they did not
bring you a roll of tobacco with a straw in it!  Now, the whole
city smokes; society is changed; and be sure of this, ladies, a
similar combat is going on in this country at present between
cigar-smoking and you.  Do you suppose you will conquer?  Look over
the wide world, and see that your adversary has overcome it.
Germany has been puffing for threescore years; France smokes to a
man.  Do you think you can keep the enemy out of England?  Psha!
look at his progress.  Ask the clubhouses, Have they smoking-rooms
or not?  Are they not obliged to yield to the general want of the
age, in spite of the resistance of the old women on the committees?
I, for my part, do not despair to see a bishop lolling out of the
"Athenaeum" with a cheroot in his mouth, or, at any rate, a pipe
stuck in his shovel-hat.

But as in all great causes and in promulgating new and illustrious
theories, their first propounders and exponents are generally the
victims of their enthusiasm, of course the first preachers of
smoking have been martyrs, too; and George Fitz-Boodle is one.  The
first gas-man was ruined; the inventor of steam-engine printing
became a pauper.  I began to smoke in days when the task was one of
some danger, and paid the penalty of my crime.  I was flogged most
fiercely for my first cigar; for, being asked to dine one Sunday
evening with a half-pay colonel of dragoons (the gallant, simple,
humorous Shortcut--heaven bless him!--I have had many a guinea from
him who had so few), he insisted upon my smoking in his room at the
"Salopian," and the consequence was, that I became so violently ill
as to be reported intoxicated upon my return to Slaughter-House
School, where I was a boarder, and I was whipped the next morning
for my peccadillo.  At Christ Church, one of our tutors was the
celebrated lamented Otto Rose, who would have been a bishop under
the present Government, had not an immoderate indulgence in water-
gruel cut short his elegant and useful career.  He was a good man,
a pretty scholar and poet (the episode upon the discovery of eau-
de-Cologne, in his prize-poem on "The Rhine," was considered a
masterpiece of art, though I am not much of a judge myself upon
such matters), and he was as remarkable for his fondness for a tuft
as for his nervous antipathy to tobacco.  As ill-luck would have
it, my rooms (in Tom Quad) were exactly under his; and I was grown
by this time to be a confirmed smoker.  I was a baronet's son (we
are of James the First's creation), and I do believe our tutor
could have pardoned any crime in the world but this.  He had seen
me in a tandem, and at that moment was seized with a violent fit of
sneezing--(sternutatory paroxysm he called it)--at the conclusion
of which I was a mile down the Woodstock Road.  He had seen me in
pink, as we used to call it, swaggering in the open sunshine across
a grass-plat in the court; but spied out opportunely a servitor,
one Todhunter by name, who was going to morning chapel with his
shoestring untied, and forthwith sprung towards that unfortunate
person, to set him an imposition.  Everything, in fact, but tobacco
he could forgive.  Why did cursed fortune bring him into the rooms
over mine?  The odor of the cigars made his gentle spirit quite
furious; and one luckless morning, when I was standing before my
"oak," and chanced to puff a great bouffee of Varinas into his
face, he forgot his respect for my family altogether (I was the
second son, and my brother a sickly creature THEN,--he is now
sixteen stone in weight, and has a half-score of children); gave me
a severe lecture, to which I replied rather hotly, as was my wont.
And then came demand for an apology; refusal on my part; appeal to
the dean; convocation; and rustication of George Savage Fitz-
Boodle.

My father had taken a second wife (of the noble house of
Flintskinner), and Lady Fitz-Boodle detested smoking, as a woman of
her high principles should.  She had an entire mastery over the
worthy old gentleman, and thought I was a sort of demon of
wickedness.  The old man went to his grave with some similar
notion,--heaven help him! and left me but the wretched twelve
thousand pounds secured to me on my poor mother's property.

In the army, my luck was much the same.  I joined the --th Lancers,
Lieut.-Col. Lord Martingale, in the year 1817.  I only did duty
with the regiment for three months.  We were quartered at Cork,
where I found the Irish doodheen and tobacco the pleasantest
smoking possible; and was found by his lordship, one day upon
stable duty, smoking the shortest, dearest little dumpy clay-pipe
in the world.

"Cornet Fitz-Boodle," said my lord in a towering passion, "from
what blackguard did you get that pipe?"

I omit the oaths which garnished invariably his lordship's
conversation.

"I got it, my lord," said I, "from one Terence Mullins, a jingle-
driver, with a packet of his peculiar tobacco.  You sometimes smoke
Turkish, I believe; do try this.  Isn't it good?"  And in the
simplest way in the world I puffed a volume into his face.  "I see
you like it," said I, so coolly, that the men--and I do believe the
horses--burst out laughing.

He started back--choking almost, and recovered himself only to vent
such a storm of oaths and curses that I was compelled to request
Capt. Rawdon (the captain on duty) to take note of his lordship's
words; and unluckily could not help adding a question which settled
my business.  "You were good enough," I said, "to ask me, my lord,
from what blackguard I got my pipe; might I ask from what
blackguard you learned your language?"

This was quite enough.  Had I said, "from what GENTLEMAN did your
lordship learn your language?" the point would have been quite as
good, and my Lord Martingale would have suffered in my place: as it
was, I was so strongly recommended to sell out by his Royal
Highness the Commander-in-Chief, that, being of a good-natured
disposition, never knowing how to refuse a friend, I at once threw
up my hopes of military distinction and retired into civil life.

My lord was kind enough to meet me afterwards in a field in the
Glanmire Road, where he put a ball into my leg.  This I returned to
him some years later with about twenty-three others--black ones--
when he came to be balloted for at a club of which I have the honor
to be a member.

Thus by the indulgence of a simple and harmless propensity,--of a
propensity which can inflict an injury upon no person or thing
except the coat and the person of him who indulges in it,--of a
custom honored and observed in almost all the nations of the
world,--of a custom which, far from leading a man into any
wickedness or dissipation to which youth is subject, on the
contrary, begets only benevolent silence, and thoughtful good-
humored observation--I found at the age of twenty all my prospects
in life destroyed.  I cared not for woman in those days: the calm
smoker has a sweet companion in his pipe.  I did not drink
immoderately of wine; for though a friend to trifling potations, to
excessively strong drinks tobacco is abhorrent.  I never thought of
gambling, for the lover of the pipe has no need of such excitement;
but I was considered a monster of dissipation in my family, and
bade fair to come to ruin.

"Look at George," my mother-in-law said to the genteel and correct
young Flintskinners.  "He entered the world with every prospect in
life, and see in what an abyss of degradation his fatal habits have
plunged him!  At school he was flogged and disgraced, he was
disgraced and rusticated at the university, he was disgraced and
expelled from the army!  He might have had the living of Boodle"
(her ladyship gave it to one of her nephews), "but he would not
take his degree; his papa would have purchased him a troop--nay, a
lieutenant-colonelcy some day, but for his fatal excesses.  And now
as long as my dear husband will listen to the voice of a wife who
adores him--never, never shall he spend a shilling upon so
worthless a young man.  He has a small income from his mother (I
cannot but think that the first Lady Fitz-Boodle was a weak and
misguided person); let him live upon his mean pittance as he can,
and I heartily pray we may not hear of him in gaol!"

My brother, after he came to the estate, married the ninth daughter
of our neighbor, Sir John Spreadeagle; and Boodle Hall has seen a
new little Fitz-Boodle with every succeeding spring.  The dowager
retired to Scotland with a large jointure and a wondrous heap of
savings.  Lady Fitz is a good creature, but she thinks me something
diabolical, trembles when she sees me, and gathers all her children
about her, rushes into the nursery whenever I pay that little
seminary a visit, and actually slapped poor little Frank's ears one
day when I was teaching him to ride upon the back of a Newfoundland
dog.

"George," said my brother to me the last time I paid him a visit at
the old hall, "don't be angry, my dear fellow, but Maria is in a--
hum--in a delicate situation, expecting her--hum"--(the eleventh)--
"and do you know you frighten her?  It was but yesterday you met
her in the rookery--you were smoking that enormous German pipe--and
when she came in she had an hysterical seizure, and Drench says
that in her situation it's dangerous.  And I say, George, if you go
to town you'll find a couple of hundred at your banker's."  And
with this the poor fellow shook me by the hand, and called for a
fresh bottle of claret.

Afterwards he told me, with many hesitations, that my room at
Boodle Hall had been made into a second nursery.  I see my sister-
in-law in London twice or thrice in the season, and the little
people, who have almost forgotten to call me uncle George.

It's hard, too, for I am a lonely man after all, and my heart
yearns to them.  The other day I smuggled a couple of them into my
chambers, and had a little feast of cream and strawberries to
welcome them.  But it had like to have cost the nursery-maid (a
Swiss girl that Fitz-Boodle hired somewhere in his travels) her
place.  My step-mamma, who happened to be in town, came flying down
in her chariot, pounced upon the poor thing and the children in the
midst of the entertainment; and when I asked her, with rather a bad
grace to be sure, to take a chair and a share of the feast--

"Mr. Fitz-Boodle," said she, "I am not accustomed to sit down in a
place that smells of tobacco like an ale-house--an ale-house
inhabited by a SERPENT, sir!  A SERPENT!--do you understand me?--
who carries his poison into his brother's own house, and purshues
his eenfamous designs before his brother's own children.  Put on
Miss Maria's bonnet this instant.  Mamsell, ontondy-voo?  Metty le
bonny a mamsell.  And I shall take care, Mamsell, that you return
to Switzerland to-morrow.  I've no doubt you are a relation of
Courvoisier--oui! oui! courvoisier, vous comprenny--and you shall
certainly be sent back to your friends."

With this speech, and with the children and their maid sobbing
before her, my lady retired; but for once my sister-in-law was on
my side, not liking the meddlement of the elder lady.

I know, then, that from indulging in that simple habit of smoking,
I have gained among the ladies a dreadful reputation.  I see that
they look coolly upon me, and darkly at their husbands when they
arrive at home in my company.  Men, I observe, in consequence, ask
me to dine much oftener at the club, or the "Star and Garter" at
Richmond, or at "Lovegrove's," than in their own houses; and with
this sort of arrangement I am fain to acquiesce; for, as I said
before, I am of an easy temper, and can at any rate take my cigar-
case out after dinner at Blackwall, when my lady or the duchess is
not by.  I know, of course, the best MEN in town; and as for
ladies' society, not having it (for I will have none of your
pseudo-ladies, such as sometimes honor bachelors' parties,--
actresses, couturieres, opera-dancers, and so forth)--as for
ladies' society, I say, I cry pish! 'tis not worth the trouble of
the complimenting, and the bother of pumps and black silk
stockings.

Let any man remember what ladies' society was when he had an
opportunity of seeing them among themselves, as What-d'ye-call'im
does in the Thesmophoria--(I beg pardon, I was on the verge of a
classical allusion, which I abominate)--I mean at that period of
his life when the intellect is pretty acute, though the body is
small--namely, when a young gentleman is about eleven years of age,
dining at his father's table during the holidays, and is requested
by his papa to quit the dinner-table when the ladies retire from
it.

Corbleu! I recollect their whole talk as well as if it had been
whispered but yesterday; and can see, after a long dinner, the
yellow summer sun throwing long shadows over the lawn before the
dining-room windows, and my poor mother and her company of ladies
sailing away to the music-room in old Boodle Hall.  The Countess
Dawdley was the great lady in our county, a portly lady who used to
love crimson satin in those days, and birds-of-paradise.  She was
flaxen-haired, and the Regent once said she resembled one of King
Charles's beauties.

When Sir John Todcaster used to begin his famous story of the
exciseman (I shall not tell it here, for very good reasons), my
poor mother used to turn to Lady Dawdley, and give that mystic
signal at which all females rise from their chairs.  Tufthunt, the
curate, would spring from his seat, and be sure to be the first to
open the door for the retreating ladies; and my brother Tom and I,
though remaining stoutly in our places, were speedily ejected from
them by the governor's invariable remark, "Tom and George, if you
have had QUITE enough of wine, you had better go and join your
mamma."  Yonder she marches, heaven bless her! through the old oak
hall (how long the shadows of the antlers are on the wainscot, and
the armor of Rollo Fitz-Boodle looks in the sunset as if it were
emblazoned with rubies)--yonder she marches, stately and tall, in
her invariable pearl-colored tabbinet, followed by Lady Dawdley,
blazing like a flamingo; next comes Lady Emily Tufthunt (she was
Lady Emily Flintskinner), who will not for all the world take
precedence of rich, vulgar, kind, good-humored Mrs. COLONEL
Grogwater, as she would be called, with a yellow little husband
from Madras, who first taught me to drink sangaree.  He was a new
arrival in our county, but paid nobly to the hounds, and occupied
hospitably a house which was always famous for its hospitality--
Sievely Hall (poor Bob Cullender ran through seven thousand a year
before he was thirty years old).  Once when I was a lad, Colonel
Grogwater gave me two gold mohurs out of his desk for whist-
markers, and I'm sorry to say I ran up from Eton and sold them both
for seventy-three shillings at a shop in Cornhill.  But to return
to the ladies, who are all this while kept waiting in the hall, and
to their usual conversation after dinner.

Can any man forget how miserably flat it was?  Five matrons sit on
sofas, and talk in a subdued voice:--

First Lady (mysteriously).--"My dear Lady Dawdley, do tell me about
poor Susan Tuckett."

Second Lady.--"All three children are perfectly well, and I assure
you as fine babies as I ever saw in my life.  I made her give them
Daffy's Elixir the first day; and it was the greatest mercy that I
had some of Frederick's baby-clothes by me; for you know I had
provided Susan with sets for one only, and really--"

Third Lady.--"Of course one couldn't; and for my part I think your
ladyship is a great deal too kind to these people.  A little
gardener's boy dressed in Lord Dawdley's frocks indeed!  I
recollect that one at his christening had the sweetest lace in the
world!"

Fourth Lady.--"What do you think of this, ma'am--Lady Emily, I
mean? I have just had it from Howell and James:--guipure, they call
it.  Isn't it an odd name for lace!  And they charge me, upon my
conscience, four guineas a yard!"

Third Lady.--"My mother, when she came to Flintskinner, had lace
upon her robe that cost sixty guineas a yard, ma'am!  'Twas sent
from Malines direct by our relation, the Count d'Araignay."

Fourth Lady (aside).--"I thought she would not let the evening pass
without talking of her Malines lace and her Count d'Araignay.
Odious people! they don't spare their backs, but they pinch their--"

Here Tom upsets a coffee-cup over his white jean trousers, and
another young gentleman bursts into a laugh, saying, "By Jove,
that's a good 'un!"

"George, my dear," says mamma, "had not you and your young friend
better go into the garden?  But mind, no fruit, or Dr. Glauber must
be called in again immediately!"  And we all go, and in ten minutes
I and my brother are fighting in the stables.

If, instead of listening to the matrons and their discourse, we had
taken the opportunity of attending to the conversation of the
Misses, we should have heard matter not a whit more interesting.

First Miss.--"They were all three in blue crape; you never saw
anything so odious.  And I know for a certainty that they wore
those dresses at Muddlebury, at the archery-ball, and I dare say
they had them in town."

Second Miss.--"Don't you think Jemima decidedly crooked?  And those
fair complexions, they freckle so, that really Miss Blanche ought
to be called Miss Brown."

Third Miss.--"He, he, he!"

Fourth Miss.--"Don't you think Blanche is a pretty name?"

First Miss.--"La! do you think so, dear?  Why, it's my second
name!"

Second Miss.--"Then I'm sure Captain Travers thinks it a BEAUTIFUL
name!"

Third Miss.--"He, he, he!"

Fourth Miss.--"What was he telling you at dinner that seemed to
interest you so?"

First Miss.--"O law, nothing!--that is, yes!  Charles--that is,--
Captain Travers, is a sweet poet, and was reciting to me some lines
that he had composed upon a faded violet:--


    "'The odor from the flower is gone,
      That like thy--,


like thy something, I forget what it was; but his lines are sweet,
and so original too!  I wish that horrid Sir John Todcaster had not
begun his story of the exciseman, for Lady Fitz-Boodle always quits
the table when he begins."

Third Miss.--"Do you like those tufts that gentlemen wear sometimes
on their chins?"

Second Miss.--"Nonsense, Mary!"

Third Miss.--"Well, I only asked, Jane.  Frank thinks, you know,
that he shall very soon have one, and puts bear's-grease on his
chin every night."

Second Miss.--"Mary, nonsense!"

Third Miss.--"Well, only ask him.  You know he came to our
dressing-room last night and took the pomatum away; and he says
that when boys go to Oxford they always--"

First Miss.--"O heavens! have you heard the news about the Lancers?
Charles--that is, Captain Travers, told it me!"

Second Miss.--"Law! they won't go away before the ball, I hope!"

First Miss.--"No, but on the 15th they are to shave their
moustaches!  He says that Lord Tufto is in a perfect fury about
it!"

Second Miss.--"And poor George Beardmore, too!" &c.

Here Tom upsets the coffee over his trousers, and the conversations
end.  I can recollect a dozen such, and ask any man of sense
whether such talk amuses him?

Try again to speak to a young lady while you are dancing--what we
call in this country--a quadrille.  What nonsense do you invariably
give and receive in return!  No, I am a woman-scorner, and don't
care to own it.  I hate young ladies!  Have I not been in love with
several, and has any one of them ever treated me decently?  I hate
married women!  Do they not hate me? and, simply because I smoke,
try to draw their husbands away from my society?  I hate dowagers!
Have I not cause?  Does not every dowager in London point to George
Fitz-Boodle as to a dissolute wretch whom young and old should
avoid?

And yet do not imagine that I have not loved.  I have, and madly,
many, many times!  I am but eight-and-thirty,* not past the age of
passion, and may very likely end by running off with an heiress--or
a cook-maid (for who knows what strange freaks Love may choose to
play in his own particular person? and I hold a man to be a mean
creature who calculates about checking any such sacred impulse as
lawful love)--I say, though despising the sex in general for their
conduct to me, I know of particular persons belonging to it who are
worthy of all respect and esteem, and as such I beg leave to point
out the particular young lady who is perusing these lines.  Do not,
dear madam, then imagine that if I knew you I should be disposed to
sneer at you.  Ah, no!  Fitz-Boodle's bosom has tenderer sentiments
than from his way of life you would fancy, and stern by rule is
only too soft by practice.  Shall I whisper to you the story of one
or two of my attachments?  All terminating fatally (not in death,
but in disappointment, which, as it occurred, I used to imagine a
thousand times more bitter than death, but from which one recovers
somehow more readily than from the other-named complaint)--all, I
say, terminating wretchedly to myself, as if some fatality pursued
my desire to become a domestic character.


* He is five-and-forty, if he is a day old.--O. Y.


My first love--no, let us pass THAT over.  Sweet one! thy name
shall profane no hireling page.  Sweet, sweet memory!  Ah, ladies,
those delicate hearts of yours have, too, felt the throb.  And
between the last 'ob' in the word throb and the words now written,
I have passed a delicious period of perhaps an hour, perhaps a
minute, I know not how long, thinking of that holy first love and
of her who inspired it.  How clearly every single incident of the
passion is remembered by me! and yet 'twas long, long since.  I was
but a child then--a child at school--and, if the truth must be
told, L--ra R-ggl-s (I would not write her whole name to be made
one of the Marquess of Hertford's executors) was a woman full
thirteen years older than myself; at the period of which I write
she must have been at least five-and-twenty.  She and her mother
used to sell tarts, hard-bake, lollipops, and other such simple
comestibles, on Wednesdays and Saturdays (half-holidays), at a
private school where I received the first rudiments of a classical
education.  I used to go and sit before her tray for hours, but I
do not think the poor girl ever supposed any motive led me so
constantly to her little stall beyond a vulgar longing for her
tarts and her ginger-beer.  Yes, even at that early period my
actions were misrepresented, and the fatality which has oppressed
my whole life began to show itself,--the purest passion was
misinterpreted by her and my school-fellows, and they thought I
was actuated by simple gluttony.  They nicknamed me Alicompayne.

Well, be it so.  Laugh at early passion ye who will; a highborn
boy madly in love with a lowly ginger-beer girl!  She married
afterwards, took the name of Latter, and now keeps with her old
husband a turnpike, through which I often ride; but I can recollect
her bright and rosy of a sunny summer afternoon, her red cheeks
shaded by a battered straw bonnet, her tarts and ginger-beer upon a
neat white cloth before her, mending blue worsted stockings until
the young gentlemen should interrupt her by coming to buy.

Many persons will call this description low; I do not envy them
their gentility, and have always observed through life (as, to be
sure, every other GENTLEMAN has observed as well as myself) that it
is your parvenu who stickles most for what he calls the genteel,
and has the most squeamish abhorrence for what is frank and
natural.  Let us pass at once, however, as all the world must be
pleased, to a recital of an affair which occurred in the very best
circles of society, as they are called, viz, my next unfortunate
attachment.

It did not occur for several years after that simple and platonic
passion just described: for though they may talk of youth as the
season of romance, it has always appeared to me that there are no
beings in the world so entirely unromantic and selfish as certain
young English gentlemen from the age of fifteen to twenty.  The
oldest Lovelace about town is scarcely more hard-hearted and
scornful than they; they ape all sorts of selfishness and rouerie:
they aim at excelling at cricket, at billiards, at rowing, and
drinking, and set more store by a red coat and a neat pair of top-
boots than by any other glory.  A young fellow staggers into
college chapel of a morning, and communicates to all his friends
that he was "so CUT last night," with the greatest possible pride.
He makes a joke of having sisters and a kind mother at home who
loves him; and if he speaks of his father, it is with a knowing
sneer to say that he has a tailor's and a horse-dealer's bill that
will surprise "the old governor."  He would be ashamed of being in
love.  I, in common with my kind, had these affectations, and my
perpetual custom of smoking added not a little to my reputation as
an accomplished roue.  What came of this custom in the army and at
college, the reader has already heard.  Alas! in life it went no
better with me, and many pretty chances I had went off in that
accursed smoke.

After quitting the army in the abrupt manner stated, I passed some
short time at home, and was tolerated by my mother-in-law, because
I had formed an attachment to a young lady of good connections and
with a considerable fortune, which was really very nearly becoming
mine.  Mary M'Alister was the only daughter of Colonel M'Alister,
late of the Blues, and Lady Susan his wife.  Her ladyship was no
more; and, indeed, of no family compared to ours (which has refused
a peerage any time these two hundred years); but being an earl's
daughter and a Scotchwoman, Lady Emily Fitz-Boodle did not fail to
consider her highly.  Lady Susan was daughter of the late Admiral
Earl of Marlingspike and Baron Plumduff.  The Colonel, Miss
M'Alister's father, had a good estate, of which his daughter was
the heiress, and as I fished her out of the water upon a pleasure-
party, and swam with her to shore, we became naturally intimate,
and Colonel M'Alister forgot, on account of the service rendered to
him, the dreadful reputation for profligacy which I enjoyed in the
county.

Well, to cut a long story short, which is told here merely for the
moral at the end of it, I should have been Fitz-Boodle M'Alister at
this minute most probably, and master of four thousand a year, but
for the fatal cigar-box.  I bear Mary no malice in saying that she
was a high-spirited little girl, loving, before all things, her own
way; nay, perhaps I do not, from long habit and indulgence in
tobacco-smoking, appreciate the delicacy of female organizations,
which were oftentimes most painfully affected by it.  She was a
keen-sighted little person, and soon found that the world had
belied poor George Fitz-Boodle; who, instead of being the cunning
monster people supposed him to be, was a simple, reckless, good-
humored, honest fellow, marvellously addicted to smoking, idleness,
and telling the truth.  She called me Orson, and I was happy enough
on the 14th February, in the year 18-- (it's of no consequence), to
send her such a pretty little copy of verses about Orson and
Valentine, in which the rude habits of the savage man were shown to
be overcome by the polished graces of his kind and brilliant
conqueror, that she was fairly overcome, and said to me, "George
Fitz-Boodle, if you give up smoking for a year, I will marry you."

I swore I would, of course, and went home and flung four pounds of
Hudson's cigars, two meerschaum pipes that had cost me ten guineas
at the establishment of Mr. Gattie at Oxford, a tobacco-bag that
Lady Fitz-Boodle had given me BEFORE her marriage with my father
(it was the only present that I ever had from her or any member of
the Flintskinner family), and some choice packets of Varinas and
Syrian, into the lake in Boodle Park.  The weapon amongst them all
which I most regretted was--will it be believed?--the little black
doodheen which had been the cause of the quarrel between Lord
Martingale and me.  However, it went along with the others.  I
would not allow my groom to have so much as a cigar, lest I should
be tempted hereafter; and the consequence was that a few days after
many fat carps and tenches in the lake (I must confess 'twas no
bigger than a pond) nibbled at the tobacco, and came floating on
their backs on the top of the water quite intoxicated.  My
conversion made some noise in the county, being emphasized as it
were by this fact of the fish.  I can't tell you with what pangs I
kept my resolution; but keep it I did for some time.

With so much beauty and wealth, Mary M'Alister had of course many
suitors, and among them was the young Lord Dawdley, whose mamma has
previously been described in her gown of red satin.  As I used to
thrash Dawdley at school, I thrashed him in after-life in love; he
put up with his disappointment pretty well, and came after a while
and shook hands with me, telling me of the bets that there were in
the county, where the whole story was known, for and against me.
For the fact is, as I must own, that Mary M'Alister, the queerest,
frankest of women, made no secret of the agreement, or the cause of
it.

"I did not care a penny for Orson," she said, "but he would go on
writing me such dear pretty verses that at last I couldn't help
saying yes.  But if he breaks his promise to me, I declare, upon my
honor, I'll break mine, and nobody's heart will be broken either."

This was the perfect fact, as I must confess, and I declare that it
was only because she amused me and delighted me, and provoked me,
and made me laugh very much, and because, no doubt, she was very
rich, that I had any attachment for her.

"For heaven's sake, George," my father said to me, as I quitted
home to follow my beloved to London, "remember that you are a
younger brother and have a lovely girl and four thousand a year
within a year's reach of you.  Smoke as much as you like, my boy,
after marriage," added the old gentleman, knowingly (as if HE,
honest soul, after his second marriage, dared drink an extra pint
of wine without my lady's permission!) "but eschew the tobacco-
shops till then."

I went to London resolving to act upon the paternal advice, and oh!
how I longed for the day when I should be married, vowing in my
secret soul that I would light a cigar as I walked out of St.
George's, Hanover Square.

Well, I came to London, and so carefully avoided smoking that I
would not even go into Hudson's shop to pay his bill, and as
smoking was not the fashion then among young men as (thank heaven!)
it is now, I had not many temptations from my friends' examples in
my clubs or elsewhere; only little Dawdley began to smoke, as if to
spite me.  He had never done so before, but confessed--the rascal!--
that he enjoyed a cigar now, if it were but to mortify me.  But I
took to other and more dangerous excitements, and upon the nights
when not in attendance upon Mary M'Alister, might be found in very
dangerous proximity to a polished mahogany table, round which
claret-bottles circulated a great deal too often, or worse still,
to a table covered with green cloth and ornamented with a couple of
wax-candles and a couple of packs of cards, and four gentlemen
playing the enticing game of whist.  Likewise, I came to carry a
snuff-box, and to consume in secret huge quantities of rappee.

For ladies' society I was even then disinclined, hating and
despising small-talk, and dancing, and hot routs, and vulgar
scrambles for suppers.  I never could understand the pleasure of
acting the part of lackey to a dowager, and standing behind her
chair, or bustling through the crowd for her carriage.  I always
found an opera too long by two acts, and have repeatedly fallen
asleep in the presence of Mary M'Alister herself, sitting at the
back of the box shaded by the huge beret of her old aunt, Lady
Betty Plumduff; and many a time has Dawdley, with Miss M'Alister on
his arm, wakened me up at the close of the entertainment in time to
offer my hand to Lady Betty, and lead the ladies to their carriage.
If I attended her occasionally to any ball or party of pleasure, I
went, it must be confessed, with clumsy, ill-disguised ill-humor.
Good heavens! have I often and often thought in the midst of a
song, or the very thick of a ball-room, can people prefer this to a
book and a sofa, and a dear, dear cigar-box, from thy stores, O
charming Mariana Woodville!  Deprived of my favorite plant, I grew
sick in mind and body, moody, sarcastic, and discontented.

Such a state of things could not long continue, nor could Miss
M'Alister continue to have much attachment for such a sullen, ill-
conditioned creature as I then was.  She used to make me wild with
her wit and her sarcasm, nor have I ever possessed the readiness to
parry or reply to those fine points of woman's wit, and she treated
me the more mercilessly as she saw that I could not resist her.

Well, the polite reader must remember a great fete that was given
at B---- House, some years back, in honor of his Highness the
Hereditary Prince of Kalbsbraten-Pumpernickel, who was then in
London on a visit to his illustrious relatives.  It was a fancy
ball, and the poems of Scott being at that time all the fashion,
Mary was to appear in the character of the "Lady of the Lake," old
M'Alister making a very tall and severe-looking harper; Dawdley, a
most insignificant Fitzjames; and your humble servant a stalwart
manly Roderick Dhu.  We were to meet at B---- House at twelve
o'clock, and as I had no fancy to drive through the town in my
cab dressed in a kilt and philibeg, I agreed to take a seat in
Dawdley's carriage, and to dress at his house in May Fair.  At
eleven I left a very pleasant bachelors' party, growling to quit
them and the honest, jovial claret-bottle, in order to scrape and
cut capers like a harlequin from the theatre.  When I arrived at
Dawdley's, I mounted to a dressing-room, and began to array myself
in my cursed costume.

The art of costuming was by no means so well understood in those
days as it has been since, and mine was out of all correctness.  I
was made to sport an enormous plume of black ostrich-feathers, such
as never was worn by any Highland chief, and had a huge tiger-skin
sporran to dangle like an apron before innumerable yards of plaid
petticoat.  The tartan cloak was outrageously hot and voluminous;
it was the dog-days, and all these things I was condemned to wear
in the midst of a crowd of a thousand people!

Dawdley sent up word, as I was dressing, that his dress had not
arrived, and he took my cab and drove off in a rage to his tailor.

There was no hurry, I thought, to make a fool of myself; so having
put on a pair of plaid trews, and very neat pumps with shoe-
buckles, my courage failed me as to the rest of the dress, and
taking down one of his dressing-gowns, I went down stairs to the
study, to wait until he should arrive.

The windows of the pretty room were open, and a snug sofa, with
innumerable cushions, drawn towards one of them.  A great tranquil
moon was staring into the chamber, in which stood, amidst books and
all sorts of bachelor's lumber, a silver tray with a couple of tall
Venice glasses, and a bottle of Maraschino bound with straw.  I can
see now the twinkle of the liquor in the moonshine, as I poured it
into the glass; and I swallowed two or three little cups of it, for
my spirits were downcast.  Close to the tray of Maraschino stood--
must I say it?--a box, a mere box of cedar, bound rudely together
with pink paper, branded with the name of "Hudson" on the side, and
bearing on the cover the arms of Spain.  I thought I would just
take up the box and look in it.

Ah heaven! there they were--a hundred and fifty of them, in calm,
comfortable rows: lovingly side by side they lay, with the great
moon shining down upon them--thin at the tip, full in the waist,
elegantly round and full, a little spot here and there shining upon
them--beauty-spots upon the cheek of Sylvia.  The house was quite
quiet.  Dawdley always smoked in his room--I had not smoked for
four months and eleven days.

        .        .        .        .        .        .

When Lord Dawdley came into the study, he did not make any remarks;
and oh, how easy my heart felt!  He was dressed in his green and
boots, after Westall's picture, correctly.

"It's time to be off, George," said he; "they told me you were
dressed long ago.  Come up, my man, and get ready."

I rushed up into the dressing-room, and madly dashed my head and
arms into a pool of eau-de-Cologne.  I drank, I believe, a
tumberful of it.  I called for my clothes, and, strange to say,
they were gone.  My servant brought them, however, saying that he
had put them away--making some stupid excuse.  I put them on, not
heeding them much, for I was half tipsy with the excitement of the
ci-- of the smo-- of what had taken place in Dawdley's study, and
with the Maraschino and the eau-de-Cologue I had drunk.

"What a fine odor of lavender-water!" said Dawdley, as we rode in
the carriage.

I put my head out of the window and shrieked out a laugh; but made
no other reply.

"What's the joke, George?" said Dawdley.  "Did I say anything
witty?"

"No," cried I, yelling still more wildly; "nothing more witty than
usual."

"Don't be severe, George," said he, with a mortified air; and we
drove on to B---- House.

        .        .        .        .        .        .

There must have been something strange and wild in my appearance,
and those awful black plumes, as I passed through the crowd; for I
observed people looking and making a strange nasal noise (it is
called sniffing, and I have no other more delicate term for it),
and making way as I pushed on.  But I moved forward very fiercely,
for the wine, the Maraschino, the eau-de-Cologne, and the--the
excitement had rendered me almost wild; and at length I arrived at
the place where my lovely Lady of the Lake and her Harper stood.
How beautiful she looked,--all eyes were upon her as she stood
blushing.  When she saw me, however; her countenance assumed an
appearance of alarm.  "Good heavens, George!" she said, stretching
her hand to me, "what makes you look so wild and pale?"  I
advanced, and was going to take her hand, when she dropped it
with a scream.

"Ah--ah--ah!" she said.  "Mr. Fitz-Boodle, you've been smoking!"

There was an immense laugh from four hundred people round about us,
and the scoundrelly Dawdley joined in the yell.  I rushed furiously
out, and, as I passed, hurtled over the fat Hereditary Prince of
Kalbsbraten-Pumpernickel.

"Es riecht hier ungeheuer stark von Tabak!" I heard his Highness
say, as I madly flung myself through the aides-de-camp.

The next day Mary M'Alister, in a note full of the most odious good
sense and sarcasm, reminded me of our agreement; said that she was
quite convinced that we were not by any means fitted for one
another, and begged me to consider myself henceforth quite free.
The little wretch had the impertinence to send me a dozen boxes of
cigars, which, she said, would console me for my lost love; as she
was perfectly certain that I was not mercenary, and that I loved
tobacco better than any woman in the world.

I believe she was right, though I have never to this day been able
to pardon the scoundrelly stratagem by which Dawdley robbed me of a
wife and won one himself.  As I was lying on his sofa, looking at
the moon and lost in a thousand happy contemplations, Lord Dawdley,
returning from the tailor's, saw me smoking at my leisure.  On
entering his dressing-room, a horrible treacherous thought struck
him.  "I must not betray my friend," said he; "but in love all is
fair, and he shall betray himself."  There were my tartans, my
cursed feathers, my tiger-skin sporran, upon the sofa.

He called up my groom; he made the rascal put on all my clothes,
and, giving him a guinea and four cigars, bade him lock himself
into the little pantry and smoke them WITHOUT TAKING THE CLOTHES
OFF.  John did so, and was very ill in consequence, and so when I
came to B---- House, my clothes were redolent of tobacco, and I
lost lovely Mary M'Alister.

I am godfather to one of Lady Dawdley's boys, and hers is the only
house where I am allowed to smoke unmolested; but I have never been
able to admire Dawdley, a sly, sournois, spiritless, lily-livered
fellow, that took his name off all his clubs the year he married.



DOROTHEA.


Beyond sparring and cricket, I do not recollect I learned anything
useful at Slaughter-House School, where I was educated (according
to an old family tradition, which sends particular generations of
gentlemen to particular schools in the kingdom; and such is the
force of habit, that though I hate the place, I shall send my own
son thither too, should I marry any day).  I say I learned little
that was useful at Slaughter House, and nothing that was ornamental.
I would as soon have thought of learning to dance as of learning to
climb chimneys.  Up to the age of seventeen, as I have shown, I had
a great contempt for the female race, and when age brought with it
warmer and juster sentiments, where was I?--I could no more dance
nor prattle to a young girl than a young bear could.  I have seen
the ugliest little low-bred wretches carrying off young and lovely
creatures, twirling with them in waltzes, whispering between their
glossy curls in quadrilles, simpering with perfect equanimity, and
cutting pas in that abominable "cavalier seul," until my soul grew
sick with fury.  In a word, I determined to learn to dance.

But such things are hard to be acquired late in life, when the
bones and the habits of a man are formed.  Look at a man in a
hunting-field who has not been taught to ride as a boy.  All the
pluck and courage in the world will not make the man of him that I
am, or as any man who has had the advantages of early education in
the field.

In the same way with dancing.  Though I went to work with immense
energy, both in Brewer Street, Golden Square (with an advertising
fellow), and afterwards with old Coulon at Paris, I never was able
to be EASY in dancing; and though little Coulon instructed me in a
smile, it was a cursed forced one, that looked like the grin of a
person in extreme agony.  I once caught sight of it in a glass, and
have hardly ever smiled since.

Most young men about London have gone through that strange secret
ordeal of the dancing-school.  I am given to understand that young
snobs from attorneys' offices, banks, shops, and the like, make not
the least mystery of their proceedings in the saltatory line, but
trip gayly, with pumps in hand, to some dancing-place about Soho,
waltz and quadrille it with Miss Greengrocer or Miss Butcher, and
fancy they have had rather a pleasant evening.  There is one house
in Dover Street, where, behind a dirty curtain, such figures may be
seen hopping every night, to a perpetual fiddling; and I have stood
sometimes wondering in the street, with about six blackguard boys
wondering too, at the strange contortions of the figures jumping up
and down to the mysterious squeaking of the kit.  Have they no
shame ces gens? are such degrading initiations to be held in
public?  No, the snob may, but the man of refined mind never can
submit to show himself in public laboring at the apprenticeship of
this most absurd art.  It is owing, perhaps, to this modesty, and
the fact that I had no sisters at home, that I have never
thoroughly been able to dance; for though I always arrive at the
end of a quadrille (and thank heaven for it too!) and though, I
believe, I make no mistake in particular, yet I solemnly confess I
have never been able thoroughly to comprehend the mysteries of it,
or what I have been about from the beginning to the end of the
dance.  I always look at the lady opposite, and do as she does: if
SHE did not know how to dance, par hasard, it would be all up.  But
if they can't do anything else, women can dance: let us give them
that praise at least.

In London, then, for a considerable time, I used to get up at eight
o'clock in the morning, and pass an hour alone with Mr. Wilkinson,
of the Theatres Royal, in Golden Square;--an hour alone.  It was
"one, two, three; one, two, three--now jump--right foot more out,
Mr. Smith; and if you COULD try and look a little more cheerful;
your partner, sir, would like you hall the better."  Wilkinson
called me Smith, for the fact is, I did not tell him my real name,
nor (thank heaven!) does he know it to this day.

I never breathed a word of my doings to any soul among my friends;
once a pack of them met me in the strange neighborhood, when, I am
ashamed to say, I muttered something about a "little French
milliner," and walked off, looking as knowing as I could.

In Paris, two Cambridge-men and myself, who happened to be staying
at a boarding-house together, agreed to go to Coulon, a little
creature of four feet high with a pigtail.  His room was hung round
with glasses.  He made us take off our coats, and dance each before
a mirror.  Once he was standing before us playing on his kit the
sight of the little master and the pupil was so supremely ridiculous,
that I burst into a yell of laughter, which so offended the old man
that he walked away abruptly, and begged me not to repeat my visits.
Nor did I.  I was just getting into waltzing then, but determined to
drop waltzing, and content myself with quadrilling for the rest of
my days.

This was all very well in France and England; but in Germany what
was I to do?  What did Hercules do when Omphale captivated him?
What did Rinaldo do when Armida fixed upon him her twinkling eyes?
Nay, to cut all historical instances short, by going at once to the
earliest, what did Adam do when Eve tempted him?  He yielded and
became her slave; and so I do heartily trust every honest man will
yield until the end of the world--he has no heart who will not.
When I was in Germany, I say, I began to learn to WALTZ.  The
reader from this will no doubt expect that some new love-adventures
befell me--nor will his gentle heart be disappointed.  Two deep and
tremendous incidents occurred which shall be notified on the
present occasion.

The reader, perhaps, remembers the brief appearance of his Highness
the Duke of Kalbsbraten-Pumpernickel at B---- House, in the first
part of my Memoirs, at that unlucky period of my life when the Duke
was led to remark the odor about my clothes, which lost me the hand
of Mary M'Alister.  I somehow found myself in his Highness's
territories, of which anybody may read a description in the
Almanach de Gotha.  His Highness's father, as is well known,
married Emilia Kunegunda Thomasina Charleria Emanuela Louisa
Georgina, Princess of Saxe-Pumpernickel, and a cousin of his
Highness the Duke.  Thus the two principalities were united under
one happy sovereign in the person of Philibert Sigismund Emanuel
Maria, the reigning Duke, who has received from his country (on
account of the celebrated pump which he erected in the marketplace
of Kalbsbraten) the well-merited appellation of the Magnificent.
The allegory which the statues round about the pump represent, is
of a very mysterious and complicated sort.  Minerva is observed
leading up Ceres to a river-god, who has his arms round the neck of
Pomona; while Mars (in a full-bottomed wig) is driven away by
Peace, under whose mantle two lovely children, representing the
Duke's two provinces, repose.  The celebrated Speck is, as need
scarcely be said, the author of this piece; and of other
magnificent edifices in the Residenz, such as the guard-room, the
skittle-hall Grossherzoglich Kalbsbratenpumpernickelisch
Schkittelspielsaal), &c., and the superb sentry-boxes before the
Grand-Ducal Palace.  He is Knight Grand Cross of the Ancient
Kartoffel Order, as, indeed, is almost every one else in his
Highness's dominions.

The town of Kalbsbraten contains a population of two thousand
inhabitants, and a palace which would accommodate about six times
that number.  The principality sends three and a half men to the
German Confederation, who are commanded by a General (Excellency),
two Major-Generals, and sixty-four officers of lower grades; all
noble, all knights of the Order, and almost all chamberlains to his
Highness the Grand Duke.  An excellent band of eighty performers is
the admiration of the surrounding country, and leads the Grand-
Ducal troops to battle in time of war.  Only three of the contingent
of soldiers returned from the Battle of Waterloo, where they won
much honor; the remainder was cut to pieces on that glorious day.

There is a chamber of representatives (which, however, nothing can
induce to sit), home and foreign ministers, residents from
neighboring courts, law presidents, town councils, &c., all the
adjuncts of a big or little government.  The court has its
chamberlains and marshals, the Grand Duchess her noble ladies in
waiting, and blushing maids of honor.  Thou wert one, Dorothea!
Dost remember the poor young Englander?  We parted in anger; but I
think--I think thou hast not forgotten him.

The way in which I have Dorothea von Speck present to my mind is
this: not as I first saw her in the garden--for her hair was in
bandeaux then, and a large Leghorn hat with a deep ribbon covered
half her fair face,--not in a morning-dress, which, by the way, was
none of the newest nor the best made--but as I saw her afterwards
at a ball at the pleasant splendid little court, where she moved
the most beautiful of the beauties of Kalbsbraten.  The grand
saloon of the palace is lighted--the Grand Duke and his officers,
the Duchess and her ladies, have passed through.  I, in my uniform,
of the --th, and a number of young fellows (who are evidently
admiring my legs and envying my distingue appearance), are waiting
round the entrance-door, where a huge Heyduke is standing, and
announcing the titles of the guests as they arrive.

"HERR OBERHOF- UND BAU-INSPEKTOR VON SPECK!" shouts the Heyduke;
and the little Inspector comes in.  His lady is on his arm huge, in
towering plumes, and her favorite costume of light blue.  Fair
women always dress in light blue or light green; and Frau von Speck
is very fair and stout.

But who comes behind her?  Lieber Himmel!  It is Dorothea!  Did
earth, among all the flowers which have sprung from its bosom,
produce ever one more beautiful?  She was none of your heavenly
beauties, I tell you.  She had nothing ethereal about her.  No,
sir; she was of the earth earthy, and must have weighed ten stone
four or five, if she weighed an ounce.  She had none of your
Chinese feet, nor waspy, unhealthy waists, which those may admire
who will.  No: Dora's foot was a good stout one; you could see her
ankle (if her robe was short enough) without the aid of a
microscope; and that envious little, sour, skinny Amalia von
Mangelwurzel used to hold up her four fingers and say (the two
girls were most intimate friends of course), "Dear Dorothea's vaist
is so much dicker as dis."  And so I have no doubt it was.

But what then?  Goethe sings in one of his divine epigrams:--


"Epicures vaunting their taste, entitle me vulgar and savage,
Give them their Brussels-sprouts, but I am contented with cabbage."


I hate your little women--that is, when I am in love with a tall
one; and who would not have loved Dorothea?

Fancy her, then, if you please, about five feet four inches high--
fancy her in the family color of light blue, a little scarf
covering the most brilliant shoulders in the world; and a pair of
gloves clinging close round an arm that may, perhaps, be somewhat
too large now, but that Juno might have envied then.  After the
fashion of young ladies on the continent, she wears no jewels or
gimcracks: her only ornament is a wreath of vine-leaves in her
hair, with little clusters of artificial grapes.  Down on her
shoulders falls the brown hair, in rich liberal clusters; all that
health, and good-humor, and beauty can do for her face, kind nature
has done for hers.  Her eyes are frank, sparkling, and kind.  As
for her cheeks, what paint-box or dictionary contains pigments or
words to describe their red?  They say she opens her mouth and
smiles always to show the dimples in her cheeks.  Psha! she smiles
because she is happy, and kind, and good-humored, and not because
her teeth are little pearls.

All the young fellows crowd up to ask her to dance, and, taking
from her waist a little mother-of-pearl remembrancer, she notes
them down.  Old Schnabel for the polonaise; Klingenspohr, first
waltz; Haarbart, second waltz; Count Hornpieper (the Danish envoy),
third; and so on.  I have said why I could not ask her to waltz,
and I turned away with a pang, and played ecarte with Colonel
Trumpenpack all night.

In thus introducing this lovely creature in her ball-costume, I
have been somewhat premature, and had best go back to the beginning
of the history of my acquaintance with her.

Dorothea, then, was the daughter of the celebrated Speck before
mentioned.  It is one of the oldest names in Germany, where her
father's and mother's houses, those of Speck and Eyer, are loved
wherever they are known.  Unlike his warlike progenitor, Lorenzo
von Speck, Dorothea's father, had early shown himself a passionate
admirer of art; had quitted home to study architecture in Italy,
and had become celebrated throughout Europe, and been appointed
Oberhofarchitect and Kunst- und Bau-inspektor of the united
principalities.  They are but four miles wide, and his genius has
consequently but little room to play.  What art can do, however, he
does.  The palace is frequently whitewashed under his eyes; the
theatre painted occasionally; the noble public buildings erected,
of which I have already made mention.

I had come to Kalbsbraten, scarce knowing whither I went; and
having, in about ten minutes, seen the curiosities of the place (I
did not care to see the King's palace, for chairs and tables have
no great charm for me), I had ordered horses, and wanted to get on
I cared not whither, when Fate threw Dorothea in my way.  I was
yawning back to the hotel through the palace-garden, a valet-de-
place at my side, when I saw a young lady seated under a tree
reading a novel, her mamma on the same bench (a fat woman in light
blue) knitting a stocking, and two officers, choked in their stays,
with various orders on their spinach-colored coats, standing by in
first attitudes: the one was caressing the fat-lady-in-blue's
little dog; the other was twirling his own moustache, which was
already as nearly as possible curled into his own eye.

I don't know how it is, but I hate to see men evidently intimate
with nice-looking women, and on good terms with themselves.
There's something annoying in their cursed complacency--their
evident sunshiny happiness.  I've no woman to make sunshine for ME;
and yet my heart tells me that not one, but several such suns,
would do good to my system.

"Who are those pert-looking officers," says I, peevishly, to the
guide, "who are talking to those vulgar-looking women?"

"The big one, with the epaulets, is Major von Schnabel; the little
one, with the pale face, is Stiefel von Klingenspohr."

"And the big blue woman?"

"The Grand-Ducal Pumpernickelian-court-architectress and Upper-
Palace-and-building-inspectress Von Speck, born V. Eyer," replied
the guide.  "Your well-born honor has seen the pump in the market-
place; that is the work of the great Von Speck."

"And yonder young person?"

"Mr. Court-architect's daughter; the Fraulein Dorothea."

        .        .        .        .        .        .

Dorothea looked up from her novel here, and turned her face towards
the stranger who was passing, and then blushing turned it down
again.  Schnabel looked at me with a scowl, Klingenspohr with a
simper, the dog with a yelp, the fat lady in blue just gave one
glance, and seemed, I thought, rather well pleased.  "Silence,
Lischen!" said she to the dog.  "Go on, darling Dorothea," she
added, to her daughter, who continued her novel.

Her voice was a little tremulous, but very low and rich.  For some
reason or other, on getting back to the inn, I countermanded the
horses, and said I would stay for the night.

I not only stayed that night, but many, many afterwards; and as for
the manner in which I became acquainted with the Speck family, why
it was a good joke against me at the time, and I did not like then
to have it known; but now it may as well come out at once.  Speck,
as everybody knows, lives in the market-place, opposite his grand
work of art, the town pump, or fountain.  I bought a large sheet of
paper, and having a knack at drawing, sat down, with the greatest
gravity, before the pump, and sketched it for several hours.  I
knew it would bring out old Speck to see.  At first he contented
himself by flattening his nose against the window-glasses of his
study, and looking what the Englander was about.  Then he put on
his gray cap with the huge green shade, and sauntered to the door:
then he walked round me, and formed one of a band of street-idlers
who were looking on: then at last he could restrain himself no
more, but, pulling off his cap, with a low bow, began to discourse
upon arts, and architecture in particular.

"It is curious," says he, "that you have taken the same view of
which a print has been engraved."

"That IS extraordinary," says I (though it wasn't, for I had traced
my drawing at a window off the very print in question).  I added
that I was, like all the world, immensely struck with the beauty of
the edifice; heard of it at Rome, where it was considered to be
superior to any of the celebrated fountains of that capital of the
fine arts; finally, that unless perhaps the celebrated fountain of
Aldgate in London might compare with it, Kalbsbraten building,
EXCEPT in that case, was incomparable.

This speech I addressed in French, of which the worthy Hofarchitect
understood somewhat, and continuing to reply in German, our
conversation grew pretty close.  It is singular that I can talk to
a man and pay him compliments with the utmost gravity, whereas, to
a woman, I at once lose all self-possession, and have never said a
pretty thing in my life.

My operations on old Speck were so conducted, that in a quarter of
an hour I had elicited from him an invitation to go over the town
with him, and see its architectural beauties.  So we walked through
the huge half-furnished chambers of the palace, we panted up the
copper pinnacle of the church-tower, we went to see the Museum and
Gymnasium, and coming back into the market-place again, what could
the Hofarchitect do but offer me a glass of wine and a seat in his
house?  He introduced me to his Gattinn, his Leocadia (the fat
woman in blue), "as a young world-observer, and worthy art-friend,
a young scion of British Adel, who had come to refresh himself at
the Urquellen of his race, and see his brethren of the great family
of Hermann."

I saw instantly that the old fellow was of a romantic turn, from
this rodomontade to his lady; nor was she a whit less so; nor was
Dorothea less sentimental than her mamma.  She knew everything
regarding the literature of Albion, as she was pleased to call it;
and asked me news of all the famous writers there.  I told her that
Miss Edgeworth was one of the loveliest young beauties at our
court; I described to her Lady Morgan, herself as beautiful as the
wild Irish girl she drew; I promised to give her a signature of
Mrs. Hemans (which I wrote for her that very evening); and
described a fox-hunt, at which I had seen Thomas Moore and Samuel
Rogers, Esquires; and a boxing-match, in which the athletic author
of "Pelham" was pitched against the hardy mountain bard,
Wordsworth.  You see my education was not neglected, for though I
have never read the works of the above-named ladies and gentlemen,
yet I knew their names well enough.

Time passed away.  I, perhaps, was never so brilliant in
conversation as when excited by the Asmanshauser and the brilliant
eyes of Dorothea that day.  She and her parents had dined at their
usual heathen hour; but I was, I don't care to own it, so smitten,
that for the first time in my life I did not even miss the meal,
and talked on until six o'clock, when tea was served.  Madame Speck
said they always drank it; and so placing a teaspoonful of bohea in
a cauldron of water, she placidly handed out this decoction, which
we took with cakes and tartines.  I leave you to imagine how
disgusted Klingenspohr and Schnabel looked when they stepped in as
usual that evening to make their party of whist with the Speck
family!  Down they were obliged to sit; and the lovely Dorothea,
for that night, declined to play altogether, and--sat on the sofa
by me.

What we talked about, who shall tell?  I would not, for my part,
break the secret of one of those delicious conversations, of which
I and every man in his time have held so many.  You begin, very
probably, about the weather--'tis a common subject, but what
sentiments the genius of Love can fling into it!  I have often, for
my part, said to the girl of my heart for the time being, "It's a
fine day," or "It's a rainy morning!" in a way that has brought
tears to her eyes.  Something beats in your heart, and twangle! a
corresponding string thrills and echoes in hers.  You offer her
anything--her knitting-needles, a slice of bread-and-butter--what
causes the grateful blush with which she accepts the one or the
other?  Why, she sees your heart handed over to her upon the
needles, and the bread-and-butter is to her a sandwich with love
inside it.  If you say to your grandmother, "Ma'am, it's a fine
day," or what not, she would find in the words no other meaning
than their outward and visible one; but say so to the girl you
love, and she understands a thousand mystic meanings in them.
Thus, in a word, though Dorothea and I did not, probably, on the
first night of our meeting, talk of anything more than the weather,
or trumps, or some subjects which to such listeners as Schnabel and
Klingenspohr and others might appear quite ordinary, yet to US they
had a different signification, of which Love alone held the key.

Without further ado then, after the occurrences of that evening, I
determined on staying at Kalbsbraten, and presenting my card the
next day to the Hof-Marshal, requesting to have the honor of being
presented to his Highness the Prince, at one of whose court-balls
my Dorothea appeared as I have described her.

It was summer when I first arrived at Kalbsbraten.  The little
court was removed to Siegmundslust, his Highness's country-seat: no
balls were taking place, and, in consequence, I held my own with
Dorothea pretty well.  I treated her admirer, Lieutenant
Klingenspohr, with perfect scorn, had a manifest advantage over
Major Schnabel, and used somehow to meet the fair one every day,
walking in company with her mamma in the palace garden, or sitting
under the acacias, with Belotte in her mother's lap, and the
favorite romance beside her.  Dear, dear Dorothea! what a number of
novels she must have read in her time!  She confesses to me that
she had been in love with Uncas, with Saint Preux, with Ivanhoe,
and with hosts of German heroes of romance; and when I asked her if
she, whose heart was so tender towards imaginary youths, had never
had a preference for any one of her living adorers, she only
looked, and blushed, and sighed, and said nothing.

You see I had got on as well as man could do, until the confounded
court season and the balls began, and then--why, then came my usual
luck.

Waltzing is a part of a German girl's life.  With the best will in
the world--which, I doubt not, she entertains for me, for I never
put the matter of marriage directly to her--Dorothea could not go
to balls and not waltz.  It was madness to me to see her whirling
round the room with officers, attaches, prim little chamberlains
with gold keys and embroidered coats, her hair floating in the
wind, her hand reposing upon the abominable little dancer's
epaulet, her good-humored face lighted up with still greater
satisfaction.  I saw that I must learn to waltz too, and took my
measures accordingly.

The leader of the ballet at the Kalbsbraten theatre in my time was
Springbock, from Vienna.  He had been a regular zephyr once, 'twas
said, in his younger days; and though he is now fifteen stone
weight, I can, helas! recommend him conscientiously as a master;
and I determined to take some lessons from him in the art which I
had neglected so foolishly in early life.

It may be said, without vanity, that I was an apt pupil, and in the
course of half a dozen lessons I had arrived at very considerable
agility in the waltzing line, and could twirl round the room with
him at such a pace as made the old gentleman pant again, and hardly
left him breath enough to puff out a compliment to his pupil.  I
may say, that in a single week I became an expert waltzer; but as I
wished, when I came out publicly in that character, to be quite
sure of myself, and as I had hitherto practised not with a lady,
but with a very fat old man, it was agreed that he should bring a
lady of his acquaintance to perfect me, and accordingly, at my
eighth lesson, Madame Springbock herself came to the dancing-room,
and the old zephyr performed on the violin.

If any man ventures the least sneer with regard to this lady, or
dares to insinuate anything disrespectful to her or myself, I say
at once that he is an impudent calumniator.  Madame Springbock is
old enough to be my grandmother, and as ugly a woman as I ever saw;
but, though old, she was passionnee pour la danse, and not having
(on account, doubtless, of her age and unprepossessing appearance)
many opportunities of indulging in her favorite pastime, made up
for lost time by immense activity whenever she could get a partner.
In vain, at the end of the hour, would Springbock exclaim, "Amalia,
my soul's blessing, the time is up!"  "Play on, dear Alphonso!"
would the old lady exclaim, whisking me round: and though I had not
the least pleasure in such a homely partner, yet for the sake of
perfecting myself I waltzed and waltzed with her, until we were
both half dead with fatigue.

At the end of three weeks I could waltz as well as any man in
Germany.

At the end of four weeks there was a grand ball at court in honor
of H. H. the Prince of Dummerland and his Princess, and THEN I
determined I would come out in public.  I dressed myself with
unusual care and splendor.  My hair was curled and my moustache
dyed to a nicety; and of the four hundred gentlemen present, if the
girls of Kalbsbraten DID select one who wore an English hussar
uniform, why should I disguise the fact?  In spite of my silence,
the news had somehow got abroad, as news will in such small towns,--
Herr von Fitz-Boodle was coming out in a waltz that evening.  His
Highness the Duke even made an allusion to the circumstance.  When
on this eventful night, I went, as usual, and made him my bow in
the presentation, "Vous, monsieur," said he--"vous qui etes si
jeune, devez aimer la danse."  I blushed as red as my trousers, and
bowing, went away.

I stepped up to Dorothea.  Heavens! how beautiful she looked! and
how archly she smiled as, with a thumping heart, I asked her hand
for a WALTZ!  She took out her little mother-of-pearl dancing-book,
she wrote down my name with her pencil: we were engaged for the
fourth waltz, and till then I left her to other partners.

Who says that his first waltz is not a nervous moment?  I vow I was
more excited than by any duel I ever fought.  I would not dance any
contre-danse or galop.  I repeatedly went to the buffet and got
glasses of punch (dear simple Germany! 'tis with rum-punch and egg-
flip thy children strengthen themselves for the dance!) I went into
the ball-room and looked--the couples bounded before me, the music
clashed and rung in my ears--all was fiery, feverish, indistinct.
The gleaming white columns, the polished oaken floors in which the
innumerable tapers were reflected--all together swam before my
eyes, and I was in a pitch of madness almost when the fourth waltz
at length came.  "WILL YOU DANCE WITH YOUR SWORD ON?" said the
sweetest voice in the world.  I blushed, and stammered, and
trembled, as I laid down that weapon and my cap, and hark! the
music began!

Oh, how my hand trembled as I placed it round the waist of Dorothea!
With my left hand I took her right--did she squeeze it?  I think she
did--to this day I think she did.  Away we went! we tripped over the
polished oak floor like two young fairies.  "Courage, monsieur," said
she, with her sweet smile.  Then it was "Tres bien, monsieur."  Then
I heard the voices humming and buzzing about.  "Il danse bien,
l'Anglais."  "Ma foi, oui," says another.  On we went, twirling and
twisting, and turning and whirling; couple after couple dropped
panting off.  Little Klingenspohr himself was obliged to give in.
All eyes were upon us--we were going round ALONE.  Dorothea was
almost exhausted, when

        *        *        *        *        *        *

I have been sitting for two hours since I marked the asterisks,
thinking--thinking.  I have committed crimes in my life--who
hasn't?  But talk of remorse, what remorse is there like THAT which
rushes up in a flood to my brain sometimes when I am alone, and
causes me to blush when I'm a-bed in the dark?

I fell, sir, on that infernal slippery floor.  Down we came like
shot; we rolled over and over in the midst of the ballroom, the
music going ten miles an hour, 800 pairs of eyes fixed upon us, a
cursed shriek of laughter bursting out from all sides.  Heavens!
how clear I heard it, as we went on rolling and rolling!  "My
child! my Dorothea!" shrieked out Madame Speck, rushing forward,
and as soon as she had breath to do so, Dorothea of course screamed
too; then she fainted, then she was disentangled from out my spurs,
and borne off by a bevy of tittering women.  "Clumsy brute!" said
Madame Speck, turning her fat back upon me.  I remained upon my
seant, wild, ghastly, looking about.  It was all up with me--I knew
it was.  I wished I could have died there, and I wish so still.

Klingenspohr married her, that is the long and short; but before
that event I placed a sabre-cut across the young scoundrel's nose,
which destroyed HIS beauty for ever.

O Dorothea! you can't forgive me--you oughtn't to forgive me; but I
love you madly still.

My next flame was Ottilia: but let us keep her for another number;
my feelings overpower me at present.



OTTILIA.


CHAPTER I.

THE ALBUM--THE MEDITERRANEAN HEATH.


Travelling some little time back in a wild part of Connemara, where
I had been for fishing and seal-shooting, I had the good luck to
get admission to the chateau of a hospitable Irish gentleman, and
to procure some news of my once dear Ottilia.

Yes, of no other than Ottilia v. Schlippenschlopp, the Muse of
Kalbsbraten-Pumpernickel, the friendly little town far away in
Sachsenland,--where old Speck built the town pump, where
Klingenspohr was slashed across the nose,--where Dorothea rolled
over and over in that horrible waltz with Fitz-Boo--  Psha!--away
with the recollection; but wasn't it strange to get news of Ottilia
in the wildest corner of Ireland, where I never should have thought
to hear her gentle name?  Walking on that very Urrisbeg Mountain
under whose shadow I heard Ottilia's name, Mackay, the learned
author of the "Flora Patlandica," discovered the Mediterranean
heath,--such a flower as I have often plucked on the sides of
Vesuvius, and as Proserpine, no doubt, amused herself in gathering
as she strayed in the fields of Enna.  Here it is--the self-same
flower, peering out at the Atlantic from Roundstone Bay; here, too,
in this wild lonely place, nestles the fragrant memory of my
Ottilia!

In a word, after a day on Ballylynch Lake (where, with a brown fly
and a single hair, I killed fourteen salmon, the smallest twenty-
nine pounds weight, the largest somewhere about five stone ten), my
young friend Blake Bodkin Lynch Browne (a fine lad who has made his
continental tour) and I adjourned, after dinner, to the young
gentleman's private room, for the purpose of smoking a certain
cigar; which is never more pleasant than after a hard day's sport,
or a day spent in-doors, or after a good dinner, or a bad one, or
at night when you are tired, or in the morning when you are fresh,
or of a cold winter's day, or of a scorching summer's afternoon, or
at any other moment you choose to fix upon.

What should I see in Blake's room but a rack of pipes, such as are
to be found in almost all the bachelors' rooms in Germany, and
amongst them was a porcelain pipe-head bearing the image of the
Kalbsbraten pump!  There it was: the old spout, the old familiar
allegory of Mars, Bacchus, Apollo virorum, and the rest, that I had
so often looked at from Hofarchitect Speck's window, as I sat
there, by the side of Dorothea.  The old gentleman had given me one
of these very pipes; for he had hundreds of them painted, wherewith
he used to gratify almost every stranger who came into his native
town.

Any old place with which I have once been familiar (as, perhaps, I
have before stated in these "Confessions"--but never mind that) is
in some sort dear to me: and were I Lord Shootingcastle or Colonel
Popland, I think after a residence of six months there I should
love the Fleet Prison.  As I saw the old familiar pipe, I took it
down, and crammed it with Cavendish tobacco, and lay down on a
sofa, and puffed away for an hour wellnigh, thinking of old, old
times.

"You're very entertaining to-night, Fitz," says young Blake, who
had made several tumblers of punch for me, which I had gulped down
without saying a word.  "Don't ye think ye'd be more easy in bed
than snorting and sighing there on my sofa, and groaning fit to
make me go hang myself?"

"I am thinking, Blake," says I, "about Pumpernickel, where old
Speck gave you this pipe."

"'Deed he did," replies the young man; "and did ye know the old
Bar'n?"

"I did," said I.  "My friend, I have been by the banks of the
Bendemeer.  Tell me, are the nightingales still singing there, and
do the roses still bloom?"

"The HWHAT?" cries Blake.  "What the divvle, Fitz, are you growling
about?  Bendemeer Lake's in Westmoreland, as I preshume; and as for
roses and nightingales, I give ye my word it's Greek ye're talking
to me."  And Greek it very possibly was, for my young friend,
though as good across country as any man in his county, has not the
fine feeling and tender perception of beauty which may be found
elsewhere, dear madam.

"Tell me about Speck, Blake, and Kalbsbraten, and Dorothea, and
Klingenspohr her husband."

"He with the cut across the nose, is it?" cries Blake.  "I know him
well, and his old wife."

"His old what, sir!" cries Fitz-Boodle, jumping up from his seat.
"Klingenspohr's wife old!--is he married again?--Is Dorothea, then,
d-d-dead?"

"Dead!--no more dead than you are, only I take her to be five-and-
thirty.  And when a woman has had nine children, you know, she
looks none the younger; and I can tell ye that when she trod on my
corruns at a ball at the Grand Juke's, I felt something heavier
than a feather on my foot."

"Madame de Klingenspohr, then," replied I, hesitating somewhat,
"has grown rather--rather st-st-out?"  I could hardly get out the
OUT, and trembled I don't know why as I asked the question.

"Stout, begad!--she weighs fourteen stone, saddle and bridle.
That's right, down goes my pipe; flop! crash falls the tumbler into
the fender!  Break away, my boy, and remember, whoever breaks a
glass here pays a dozen."

The fact was, that the announcement of Dorothea's changed condition
caused no small disturbance within me, and I expressed it in the
abrupt manner mentioned by young Blake.

Roused thus from my reverie, I questioned the young fellow about
his residence at Kalbsbraten, which has been always since the war a
favorite place for our young gentry, and heard with some satisfaction
that Potzdorff was married to the Behrenstein, Haabart had left the
dragoons, the Crown Prince had broken with the ---- but mum! of what
interest are all these details to the reader, who has never been at
friendly little Kalbsbraten?

Presently Lynch reaches me down one of the three books that formed
his library (the "Racing Calendar" and a book of fishing-flies
making up the remainder of the set).  "And there's my album," says
he.  "You'll find plenty of hands in it that you'll recognize, as
you are an old Pumpernickelaner."  And so I did, in truth: it was a
little book after the fashion of German albums, in which good
simple little ledger every friend or acquaintance of the owner
inscribes a poem or stanza from some favorite poet or philosopher
with the transcriber's own name, as thus:--


"To the true house-friend, and beloved Irelandish youth.

"'Sera nunquam est ad bonos mores via.'

WACKERBART, Professor at the Grand-Ducal Kalbsbraten-Pumpernickelisch
Gymnasium."


Another writes,--


"'Wander on roses and forget me not.'

AMALIA v. NACHTMUTZE,

GEB. v. SHALAFROCK,"


with a flourish, and the picture mayhap of a rose.  Let the reader
imagine some hundreds of these interesting inscriptions, and he
will have an idea of the book.

Turning over the leaves I came presently on DOROTHEA'S hand.  There
it was, the little neat, pretty handwriting, the dear old up-and-
down strokes that I had not looked at for many a long year,--the
Mediterranean heath, which grew on the sunniest banks of Fitz-
Boodle's existence, and here found, dear, dear little sprig! in
rude Galwagian bog-lands.

"Look at the other side of the page," says Lynch, rather
sarcastically (for I don't care to confess that I kissed the name
of "Dorothea v. Klingenspohr, born v. Speck" written under an
extremely feeble passage of verse).  "Look at the other side of the
paper!"

I did, and what do you think I saw?

I saw the writing of five of the little Klingenspohrs, who have all
sprung up since my time.

        .        .        .        .        .        .

"Ha! ha! haw!" screamed the impertinent young Irishman, and the
story was all over Connemara and Joyce's Country in a day after.


CHAPTER II.

OTTILIA IN PARTICULAR.


Some kind critic who peruses these writings will, doubtless, have
the goodness to point out that the simile of the Mediterranean
heath is applied to two personages in this chapter--to Ottilia and
Dorothea, and say, Psha! the fellow is but a poor unimaginative
creature not to be able to find a simile apiece at least for the
girls; how much better would WE have done the business!

Well, it is a very pretty simile.  The girls were rivals, were
beautiful, I loved them both,--which should have the sprig of
heath?  Mr. Cruikshank (who has taken to serious painting) is
getting ready for the exhibition a fine piece, representing Fitz-
Boodle on the Urrisbeg Mountain, county Galway, Ireland, with a
sprig of heath in his hand, hesitating, like Paris, on which of the
beauties he should bestow it.  In the background is a certain
animal between two bundles of hay; but that I take to represent the
critic, puzzled to which of my young beauties to assign the choice.

If Dorothea had been as rich as Miss Coutts, and had come to me the
next day after the accident at the ball and said, "George, will you
marry me?" it must not be supposed I would have done any such
thing.  THAT dream had vanished for ever: rage and pride took the
place of love; and the only chance I had of recovering from my
dreadful discomfiture was by bearing it bravely, and trying, if
possible, to awaken a little compassion in my favor.  I limped home
(arranging my scheme with great presence of mind, as I actually
sat spinning there on the ground)--I limped home, sent for
Pflastersticken, the court-surgeon, and addressed him to the
following effect: "Pflastersticken," says I, "there has been an
accident at court of which you will hear.  You will send in
leeches, pills, and the deuce knows what, and you will say that I
have dislocated my leg: for some days you will state that I am in
considerable danger.  You are a good fellow and a man of courage I
know, for which very reason you can appreciate those qualities in
another; so mind, if you breathe a word of my secret, either you or
I must lose a life."

Away went the surgeon, and the next day all Kalbsbraten knew that I
was on the point of death: I had been delirious all night, had had
eighty leeches, besides I don't know how much medicine; but the
Kalbsbrateners knew to a scruple.  Whenever anybody was ill, this
little kind society knew what medicines were prescribed.  Everybody
in the town knew what everybody had for dinner.  If Madame Rumpel
had her satin dyed ever so quietly, the whole society was on the
qui vive; if Countess Pultuski sent to Berlin for a new set of
teeth, not a person in Kalbsbraten but what was ready to compliment
her as she put them on; if Potzdorff paid his tailor's bill, or
Muffinstein bought a piece of black wax for his moustaches, it was
the talk of the little city.  And so, of course, was my accident.
In their sorrow for my misfortune, Dorothea's was quite forgotten,
and those eighty leeches saved me.  I became interesting; I had
cards left at my door; and I kept my room for a fortnight, during
which time I read every one of M. Kotzebue's plays.

At the end of that period I was convalescent, though still a little
lame.  I called at old Speck's house and apologized for my
clumsiness, with the most admirable coolness; I appeared at court,
and stated calmly that I did not intend to dance any more; and when
Klingenspohr grinned, I told that young gentleman such a piece of
my mind as led to his wearing a large sticking-plaster patch on his
nose: which was split as neatly down the middle as you would split
an orange at dessert.  In a word what man could do to repair my
defeat, I did.

There is but one thing now of which I am ashamed--of those killing
epigrams which I wrote (mon Dieu! must I own it?--but even the fury
of my anger proves the extent of my love!) against the Speck
family.  They were handed about in confidence at court, and made a
frightful sensation:


              "IS IT POSSIBLE?"

     "There happened at Schloss P-mp-rn-ckel,
      A strange mishap our sides to tickle,
        And set the people in a roar;--
      A strange caprice of Fortune fickle:
      I never thought at Pumpernickel
        To see a SPECK UPON THE FLOOR)"


  LA PERFIDE ALBION; OR, A CAUTION TO WALTZERS.

     "'Come to the dance,' the Briton said,
      And forward D-r-th-a led,
        Fair, fresh, and three-and-twenty!
      Ah, girls; beware of Britons red!
      What wonder that it TURNED HER HEAD?
        SAT VERBUM SAPIENTI."


     "REASONS FOR NOT MARRYING.

     "'The lovely Miss S.
      Will surely say "yes,"
      You've only to ask and try;'
      'That subject we'll quit;'
      Says Georgy the wit,
      'I'VE A MUCH BETTER SPEC IN MY EYE!'"


This last epigram especially was voted so killing that it flew like
wildfire; and I know for a fact that our Charge-d'Affaires at
Kalbsbraten sent a courier express with it to the Foreign Office in
England, whence, through our amiable Foreign Secretary, Lord
P-lm-rston, it made its way into every fashionable circle: nay,
I have reason to believe caused a smile on the cheek of R-y-lty
itself.  Now that Time has taken away the sting of these epigrams,
there can be no harm in giving them; and 'twas well enough then to
endeavor to hide under the lash of wit the bitter pangs of
humiliation: but my heart bleeds now to think that I should have
ever brought a tear on the gentle cheek of Dorothea.

Not content with this--with humiliating her by satire, and with
wounding her accepted lover across the nose--I determined to carry
my revenge still farther, and to fall in love with somebody else.
This person was Ottilia v. Schlippenschlopp.

Otho Sigismund Freyherr von Schlippenschlopp, Knight Grand Cross of
the Ducal Order of the Two-Necked Swan of Pumpernickel, of the
Porc-et-Siflet of Kalbsbraten, Commander of the George and Blue-
Boar of Dummerland, Excellency, and High Chancellor of the United
Duchies, lived in the second floor of a house in the Schwapsgasse;
where, with his private income and his revenues as Chancellor,
amounting together to some 300L. per annum, he maintained such a
state as very few other officers of the Grand-Ducal Crown could
exhibit.  The Baron is married to Marie Antoinette, a Countess of
the house of Kartoffelstadt, branches of which have taken root all
over Germany.  He has no sons, and but one daughter, the Fraulein
OTTILIA.

The Chancellor is a worthy old gentleman, too fat and wheezy to
preside at the Privy Council, fond of his pipe, his ease, and his
rubber.  His lady is a very tall and pale Roman-nosed Countess, who
looks as gentle as Mrs. Robert Roy, where, in the novel, she is for
putting Baillie Nicol Jarvie into the lake, and who keeps the
honest Chancellor in the greatest order.  The Fraulein Ottilia had
not arrived at Kalbsbraten when the little affair between me and
Dorothea was going on; or rather had only just come in for the
conclusion of it, being presented for the first time that year at
the ball where I--where I met with my accident.

At the time when the Countess was young, it was not the fashion in
her country to educate the young ladies so highly as since they
have been educated; and provided they could waltz, sew, and make
puddings, they were thought to be decently bred; being seldom
called upon for algebra or Sanscrit in the discharge of the honest
duties of their lives.  But Fraulein Ottilia was of the modern
school in this respect, and came back from the pension at Strasburg
speaking all the languages, dabbling in all the sciences: an
historian, a poet,--a blue of the ultramarinest sort, in a word.
What a difference there was, for instance, between poor, simple
Dorothea's love of novel reading and the profound encyclopaedic
learning of Ottilia!

Before the latter arrived from Strasburg (where she had been
under the care of her aunt the canoness, Countess Ottilia of
Kartoffeldstadt, to whom I here beg to offer my humblest respects),
Dorothea had passed for a bel esprit in the little court circle,
and her little simple stock of accomplishments had amused us all
very well.  She used to sing "Herz, mein Herz" and "T'en souviens-
tu," in a decent manner (ONCE, before heaven, I thought her singing
better than Grisi's), and then she had a little album in which she
drew flowers, and used to embroider slippers wonderfully, and was
very merry at a game of loto or forfeits, and had a hundred small
agremens de societe! which rendered her an acceptable member of it.

But when Ottilia arrived, poor Dolly's reputation was crushed in a
month.  The former wrote poems both in French and German; she
painted landscapes and portraits in real oil; and she twanged off a
rattling piece of Listz or Kalkbrenner in such a brilliant way,
that Dora scarcely dared to touch the instrument after her, or
ventured, after Ottilia had trilled and gurgled through "Una voce,"
or "Di piacer" (Rossini was in fashion then), to lift up her little
modest pipe in a ballad.  What was the use of the poor thing going
to sit in the park, where so many of the young officers used ever
to gather round her?  Whir!  Ottilia went by galloping on a
chestnut mare with a groom after her, and presently all the young
fellows who could buy or hire horseflesh were prancing in her
train.

When they met, Ottilia would bounce towards her soul's darling, and
put her hands round her waist, and call her by a thousand
affectionate names, and then talk of her as only ladies or authors
can talk of one another.  How tenderly she would hint at Dora's
little imperfections of education!--how cleverly she would
insinuate that the poor girl had no wit! and, thank God, no more
she had.  The fact is, that do what I will I see I'm in love with
her still, and would be if she had fifty children; but my passion
blinded me THEN, and every arrow that fiery Ottilia discharged I
marked with savage joy.  Dolly, thank heaven, didn't mind the wit
much; she was too simple for that.  But still the recurrence of it
would leave in her heart a vague, indefinite feeling of pain, and
somehow she began to understand that her empire was passing away,
and that her dear friend hated her like poison; and so she married
Klingenspohr.  I have written myself almost into a reconciliation
with the silly fellow; for the truth is, he has been a good, honest
husband to her, and she has children, and makes puddings, and is
happy.

Ottilia was pale and delicate.  She wore her glistening black hair
in bands, and dressed in vapory white muslin.  She sang her own
words to her harp, and they commonly insinuated that she was alone
in the world,--that she suffered some inexpressible and mysterious
heart-pangs, the lot of all finer geniuses,--that though she lived
and moved in the world she was not of it, that she was of a
consumptive tendency and might look for a premature interment.  She
even had fixed on the spot where she should lie: the violets grew
there, she said, the river went moaning by; the gray willow
whispered sadly over her head, and her heart pined to be at rest.
"Mother," she would say, turning to her parent, "promise me--
promise me to lay me in that spot when the parting hour has come!"
At which Madame de Schlippenschlopp would shriek, and grasp her in
her arms; and at which, I confess, I would myself blubber like a
child.  She had six darling friends at school, and every courier
from Kalbsbraten carried off whole reams of her letter-paper.

In Kalbsbraten, as in every other German town, there are a vast
number of literary characters, of whom our young friend quickly
became the chief.  They set up a literary journal, which appeared
once a week, upon light-blue or primrose paper, and which, in
compliment to the lovely Ottilia's maternal name, was called the
Kartoffelnkranz.  Here are a couple of her ballads extracted from
the Kranz, and by far the most cheerful specimen of her style.  For
in her songs she never would willingly let off the heroines without
a suicide or a consumption.  She never would hear of such a thing
as a happy marriage, and had an appetite for grief quite amazing in
so young a person.  As for her dying and desiring to be buried
under the willow-tree, of which the first ballad is the subject,
though I believed the story then, I have at present some doubts
about it.  For, since the publication of my Memoirs, I have been
thrown much into the society of literary persons (who admire my
style hugely), and egad! though some of them are dismal enough in
their works, I find them in their persons the least sentimental
class that ever a gentleman fell in with.


"THE WILLOW-TREE.


"Know ye the willow-tree
  Whose gray leaves quiver,
Whispering gloomily
  To yon pale river?
Lady, at even-tide
  Wander not near it,
They say its branches hide
  A sad, lost spirit!

"Once to the willow-tree
  A maid came fearful,
Pale seemed her cheek to be,
  Her blue eye tearful;
Soon as she saw the tree,
  Her step moved fleeter,
No one was there--ah me!
  No one to meet her!

"Quick beat her heart to hear
  The far bell's chime
Toll from the chapel-tower
  The trysting time:
But the red sun went down
  In golden flame,
And though she looked round,
  Yet no one came!

"Presently came the night,
  Sadly to greet her,--
Moon in her silver light,
  Stars in their glitter.
Then sank the moon away
  Under the billow,
Still wept the maid alone--
  There by the willow!

"Through the long darkness,
  By the stream rolling,
Hour after hour went on
  Tolling and tolling.
Long was the darkness,
  Lonely and stilly;
Shrill came the night-wind,
  Piercing and chilly.

"Shrill blew the morning breeze,
  Biting and cold,
Bleak peers the gray dawn
  Over the wold.
Bleak over moor and stream
  Looks the grey dawn,
Gray, with dishevelled hair,
Still stands the willow there--
  THE MAID IS GONE!

"Domine, Domine!
  Sing we a litany,--
Sing for poor maiden-hearts broken and weary;
  Domine, Domine!
Sing we a litany,
  Wail we and weep we a wild Miserere!"


One of the chief beauties of this ballad (for the translation of
which I received some well-merited compliments) is the delicate way
in which the suicide of the poor young woman under the willow-tree
is hinted at; for that she threw herself into the water and became
one among the lilies of the stream, is as clear as a pikestaff.
Her suicide is committed some time in the darkness, when the slow
hours move on tolling and tolling, and is hinted at darkly as
befits the time and the deed.

But that unromantic brute, Van Cutsem, the Dutch Charge-d'Affaires,
sent to the Kartoffelnkranz of the week after a conclusion of the
ballad, which shows what a poor creature he must be.  His pretext
for writing it was, he said, because he could not bear such
melancholy endings to poems and young women, and therefore he
submitted the following lines:--


I.

"Long by the willow-trees
  Vainly they sought her,
Wild rang the mother's screams
  O'er the gray water:
'Where is my lovely one?
  Where is my daughter?

II.

"'Rouse thee, sir constable--
  Rouse thee and look;
Fisherman, bring your net,
  Boatman your hook.
Beat in the lily-beds,
  Dive in the brook!'

III.

"Vainly the constable
  Shouted and called her;
Vainly the fisherman
  Beat the green alder;
Vainly he flung the net,
  Never it hauled her!

IV.

"Mother beside the fire
  Sat, her nightcap in;
Father, in easy chair,
  Gloomily napping;
When at the window-sill
  Came a light tapping!

V.

"And a pale countenance
  Looked through the casement.
Loud beat the mother's heart,
  Sick with amazement,
And at the vision which
  Came to surprise her,
Shrieked in an agony--
  'Lor! it's Elizar!'

VI

"Yes, 'twas Elizabeth--
  Yes, 'twas their girl;
Pale was her cheek, and her
  Hair out of curl.
'Mother!' the loving one,
  Blushing, exclaimed,
'Let not your innocent
  Lizzy be blamed.

VII.

"'Yesterday, going to aunt
  Jones's to tea,
Mother, dear mother, I
  FORGOT THE DOOR-KEY!
And as the night was cold,
  And the way steep,
Mrs. Jones kept me to
  Breakfast and sleep.'

VIII.

"Whether her Pa and Ma
  Fully believed her,
That we shall never know,
  Stern they received her;
And for the work of that
  Cruel, though short, night,
Sent her to bed without
  Tea for a fortnight.

IX.

       "MORAL

"Hey diddle diddlety,
  Cat and the Fiddlety,
Maidens of England take caution by she!
  Let love and suicide
  Never tempt you aside,
And always remember to take the door-key!"


Some people laughed at this parody, and even preferred it to the
original; but for myself I have no patience with the individual who
can turn the finest sentiments of our nature into ridicule, and
make everything sacred a subject of scorn.  The next ballad is less
gloomy than that of the willow-tree, and in it the lovely writer
expresses her longing for what has charmed us all, and, as it were,
squeezes the whole spirit of the fairy tale into a few stanzas:--


"FAIRY DAYS.

"Beside the old hall-fire--upon my nurse's knee,
Of happy fairy days--what tales were told to me!
I thought the world was once--all peopled with princesses,
And my heart would beat to hear--their loves and their distresses;
And many a quiet night,--in slumber sweet and deep,
The pretty fairy people--would visit me in sleep.

"I saw them in my dreams--come flying east and west,
With wondrous fairy gifts--the new-born babe they bless'd;
One has brought a jewel--and one a crown of gold,
And one has brought a curse--but she is wrinkled and old.
The gentle queen turns pale--to hear those words of sin,
But the king he only laughs--and bids the dance begin.

"The babe has grown to be--the fairest of the land
And rides the forest green--a hawk upon her hand.
An ambling palfrey white--a golden robe and crown;
I've seen her in my dreams--riding up and down;
And heard the ogre laugh--as she fell into his snare,
At the little tender creature--who wept and tore her hair!

"But ever when it seemed--her need was at the sorest
A prince in shining mail--comes prancing through the forest.
A waving ostrich-plume--a buckler burnished bright;
I've seen him in my dreams--good sooth! a gallant knight.
His lips are coral red--beneath a dark moustache;
See how he waves his hand--and how his blue eyes flash!

"'Come forth, thou Paynim knight!'--he shouts in accents clear.
The giant and the maid--both tremble his voice to hear.
Saint Mary guard him well!--he draws his falchion keen,
The giant and the knight--are fighting on the green.
I see them in my dreams--his blade gives stroke on stroke,
The giant pants and reels--and tumbles like an oak!

"With what a blushing grace--he falls upon his knee
And takes the lady's hand--and whispers, 'You are free!'
Ah! happy childish tales--of knight and faerie!
I waken from my dreams--but there's ne'er a knight for me;
I waken from my dreams--and wish that I could be
A child by the old hall-fire--upon my nurse's knee."


Indeed, Ottilia looked like a fairy herself: pale, small, slim, and
airy.  You could not see her face, as it were, for her eyes, which
were so wild, and so tender, and shone so that they would have
dazzled an eagle, much more a poor goose of a Fitz-Boodle.  In the
theatre, when she sat on the opposite side of the house, those big
eyes used to pursue me as I sat pretending to listen to the
"Zauberflote," or to "Don Carlos," or "Egmont," and at the tender
passages, especially, they would have such a winning, weeping,
imploring look with them as flesh and blood could not bear.

Shall I tell how I became a poet for the dear girl's sake?  'Tis
surely unnecessary after the reader has perused the above versions
of her poems.  Shall I tell what wild follies I committed in prose
as well as in verse? how I used to watch under her window of icy
evenings, and with chilblainy fingers sing serenades to her on the
guitar?  Shall I tell how, in a sledging-party, I had the happiness
to drive her, and of the delightful privilege which is, on these
occasions, accorded to the driver?

Any reader who has spent a winter in Germany perhaps knows it.  A
large party of a score or more of sledges is formed.  Away they go
to some pleasure-house that has been previously fixed upon, where a
ball and collation are prepared, and where each man, as his partner
descends, has the delicious privilege of saluting her.  O heavens
and earth! I may grow to be a thousand years old, but I can never
forget the rapture of that salute.

"The keen air has given me an appetite," said the dear angel, as we
entered the supper-room; and to say the truth, fairy as she was,
she made a remarkably good meal--consuming a couple of basins of
white soup, several kinds of German sausages, some Westphalia ham,
some white puddings, an anchovy-salad made with cornichons and
onions, sweets innumerable, and a considerable quantity of old
Steinwein and rum-punch afterwards.  Then she got up and danced as
brisk as a fairy; in which operation I of course did not follow
her, but had the honor, at the close of the evening's amusement,
once more to have her by my side in the sledge, as we swept in the
moonlight over the snow.

Kalbsbraten is a very hospitable place as far as tea-parties are
concerned, but I never was in one where dinners were so scarce.  At
the palace they occurred twice or thrice in a month; but on these
occasions spinsters were not invited, and I seldom had the
opportunity of seeing my Ottilia except at evening-parties.

Nor are these, if the truth must be told, very much to my taste.
Dancing I have forsworn, whist is too severe a study for me, and I
do not like to play ecarte with old ladies, who are sure to cheat
you in the course of an evening's play.

But to have an occasional glance at Ottilia was enough; and
many and many a napoleon did I lose to her mamma, Madame de
Schlippenschlopp, for the blest privilege of looking at her
daughter.  Many is the tea-party I went to, shivering into cold
clothes after dinner (which is my abomination) in order to have one
little look at the lady of my soul.

At these parties there were generally refreshments of a nature more
substantial than mere tea punch, both milk and rum, hot wine,
consomme, and a peculiar and exceedingly disagreeable sandwich made
of a mixture of cold white puddings and garlic, of which I have
forgotten the name, and always detested the savor.

Gradually a conviction came upon me that Ottilia ATE A GREAT DEAL.

I do not dislike to see a woman eat comfortably.  I even think that
an agreeable woman ought to be friande, and should love certain
little dishes and knick-knacks.  I know that though at dinner they
commonly take nothing, they have had roast-mutton with the children
at two, and laugh at their pretensions to starvation.

No! a woman who eats a grain of rice, like Amina in the "Arabian
Nights," is absurd and unnatural; but there is a modus in rebus:
there is no reason why she should be a ghoul, a monster, an ogress,
a horrid gormandizeress--faugh!

It was, then, with a rage amounting almost to agony, that I found
Ottilia ate too much at every meal.  She was always eating, and
always eating too much.  If I went there in the morning, there was
the horrid familiar odor of those oniony sandwiches; if in the
afternoon, dinner had been just removed, and I was choked by
reeking reminiscences of roast-meat.  Tea we have spoken of.  She
gobbled up more cakes than any six people present; then came the
supper and the sandwiches again, and the egg-flip and the horrible
rum-punch.

She was as thin as ever--paler if possible than ever:--but, by
heavens! HER NOSE BEGAN TO GROW RED!

Mon Dieu! how I used to watch and watch it!  Some days it was
purple, some days had more of the vermilion--I could take an
affidavit that after a heavy night's supper it was more swollen,
more red than before.

I recollect one night when we were playing a round game (I had been
looking at her nose very eagerly and sadly for some time), she of
herself brought up the conversation about eating, and confessed
that she had five meals a day.

"THAT ACCOUNTS FOR IT!" says I, flinging down the cards, and
springing up and rushing like a madman out of the room.  I rushed
away into the night, and wrestled with my passion.  "What!  Marry,"
said I, "a woman who eats meat twenty-one times in a week, besides
breakfast and tea?  Marry a sarcophagus, a cannibal, a butcher's
shop?--Away!"  I strove and strove.  I drank, I groaned, I wrestled
and fought with my love--but it overcame me: one look of those eyes
brought me to her feet again.  I yielded myself up like a slave; I
fawned and whined for her; I thought her nose was not so VERY red.

Things came to this pitch that I sounded his Highness's Minister to
know whether he would give me service in the Duchy; I thought of
purchasing an estate there.  I was given to understand that I
should get a chamberlain's key and some post of honor did I choose
to remain, and I even wrote home to my brother Tom in England,
hinting a change in my condition.

At this juncture the town of Hamburg sent his Highness the Grand
Duke (apropos of a commercial union which was pending between the
two States) a singular present: no less than a certain number of
barrels of oysters, which are considered extreme luxuries in
Germany, especially in the inland parts of the country, where they
are almost unknown.

In honor of the oysters and the new commercial treaty (which
arrived in fourgons despatched for the purpose), his Highness
announced a grand supper and ball, and invited all the quality of
all the principalities round about.  It was a splendid affair: the
grand saloon brilliant with hundreds of uniforms and brilliant
toilettes--not the least beautiful among them, I need not say, was
Ottilia.

At midnight the supper-rooms were thrown open and we formed into
little parties of six, each having a table, nobly served with
plate, a lackey in attendance, and a gratifying ice-pail or two of
champagne to egayer the supper.  It was no small cost to serve five
hundred people on silver, and the repast was certainly a princely
and magnificent one.

I had, of course, arranged with Mademoiselle de Schlippenschlopp.
Captains Frumpel and Fridelberger of the Duke's Guard, Mesdames de
Butterbrod and Bopp, formed our little party.

The first course, of course, consisted of THE OYSTERS.  Ottilia's
eyes gleamed with double brilliancy as the lackey opened them.
There were nine apiece for us--how well I recollect the number!

I never was much of an oyster-eater, nor can I relish them in
naturalibus as some do, but require a quantity of sauces, lemons,
cayenne peppers, bread and butter, and so forth, to render them
palatable.

By the time I had made my preparations, Ottilia, the Captains, and
the two ladies, had wellnigh finished theirs.  Indeed Ottilia had
gobbled up all hers, and there were only my nine in the dish.

I took one--IT WAS BAD.  The scent of it was enough,--they were all
bad.  Ottilia had eaten nine bad oysters.

I put down the horrid shell.  Her eyes glistened more and more; she
could not take them off the tray.

"Dear Herr George," she said, "WILL YOU GIVE ME YOUR OYSTERS?"

        .        .        .        .        .        .

She had them all down--before--I could say--Jack--Robinson!

I left Kalbsbraten that night, and have never been there since.




FITZ-BOODLE'S PROFESSIONS.

BEING APPEALS TO THE UNEMPLOYED YOUNGER SONS OF THE NOBILITY.


FIRST PROFESSION.


The fair and honest proposition in which I offered to communicate
privately with parents and guardians, relative to two new and
lucrative professions which I had discovered, has, I find from the
publisher, elicited not one single inquiry from those personages,
who I can't but think are very little careful of their children's
welfare to allow such a chance to be thrown away.  It is not for
myself I speak, as my conscience proudly tells me; for though I
actually gave up Ascot in order to be in the way should any father
of a family be inclined to treat with me regarding my discoveries,
yet I am grieved, not on my own account, but on theirs, and for the
wretched penny-wise policy that has held them back.

That they must feel an interest in my announcement is unquestionable.
Look at the way in which the public prints of all parties have
noticed my appearance in the character of a literary man!  Putting
aside my personal narrative, look at the offer I made to the
nation,--a choice of no less than two new professions!  Suppose I had
invented as many new kinds of butcher's meat; does any one pretend
that the world, tired as it is of the perpetual recurrence of beef,
mutton, veal, cold beef, cold veal, cold mutton, hashed ditto, would
not have jumped eagerly at the delightful intelligence that their
old, stale, stupid meals were about to be varied at last?

Of course people would have come forward.  I should have had
deputations from Mr. Gibletts and the fashionable butchers of this
world; petitions would have poured in from Whitechapel salesmen;
the speculators panting to know the discovery; the cautious with
stock in hand eager to bribe me to silence and prevent the certain
depreciation of the goods which they already possessed.  I should
have dealt with them, not greedily or rapaciously, but on honest
principles of fair barter.  "Gentlemen," I should have said, or
rather, "Gents"--which affectionate diminutive is, I am given to
understand, at present much in use among commercial persons--
"Gents, my researches, my genius, or my good fortune, have brought
me to the valuable discovery about which you are come to treat.
Will you purchase it outright, or will you give the discoverer an
honest share of the profits resulting from your speculation?  My
position in the world puts ME out of the power of executing the
vast plan I have formed, but 'twill be a certain fortune to him who
engages in it; and why should not I, too, participate in that
fortune?"

Such would have been my manner of dealing with the world, too, with
regard to my discovery of the new professions.  Does not the world
want new professions?  Are there not thousands of well-educated men
panting, struggling, pushing, starving, in the old ones?  Grim
tenants of chambers looking out for attorneys who never come?--
wretched physicians practising the stale joke of being called out
of church until people no longer think fit even to laugh or to
pity?  Are there not hoary-headed midshipmen, antique ensigns
growing mouldy upon fifty years' half-pay?  Nay, are there not men
who would pay anything to be employed rather than remain idle?  But
such is the glut of professionals, the horrible cut-throat
competition among them, that there is no chance for one in a
thousand, be he ever so willing, or brave, or clever: in the great
ocean of life he makes a few strokes, and puffs, and sputters, and
sinks, and the innumerable waves overwhelm him and he is heard of
no more.

Walking to my banker's t'other day--and I pledge my sacred honor
this story is true--I met a young fellow whom I had known attache
to an embassy abroad, a young man of tolerable parts, unwearied
patience, with some fortune too, and, moreover, allied to a noble
Whig family, whose interest had procured him his appointment to the
legation at Krahwinkel, where I knew him.  He remained for ten
years a diplomatic character; he was the working-man of the
legation; he sent over the most diffuse translations of the German
papers for the use of the Foreign Secretary; he signed passports
with most astonishing ardor; he exiled himself for ten long years
in a wretched German town, dancing attendance at court-balls and
paying no end of money for uniforms.  And what for?  At the end of
the ten years--during which period of labor he never received a
single shilling from the Government which employed him (rascally
spendthrift of a Government, va!),--he was offered the paid
attacheship to the court of H. M. the King of the Mosquito Islands,
and refused that appointment a week before the Whig Ministry
retired.  Then he knew that there was no further chance for him,
and incontinently quitted the diplomatic service for ever, and I
have no doubt will sell his uniform a bargain.  The Government had
HIM a bargain certainly; nor is he by any means the first person
who has been sold at that price.

Well, my worthy friend met me in the street and informed me of
these facts with a smiling countenance,--which I thought a
masterpiece of diplomacy.  Fortune had been belaboring and kicking
him for ten whole years, and here he was grinning in my face: could
Monsieur de Talleyrand have acted better?  "I have given up
diplomacy," said Protocol, quite simply and good-humoredly, "for
between you and me, my good fellow, it's a very slow profession;
sure, perhaps, but slow.  But though I gained no actual pecuniary
remuneration in the service, I have learned all the languages in
Europe, which will be invaluable to me in my new profession--the
mercantile one--in which directly I looked out for a post I found
one."

"What! and a good pay?" said I.

"Why, no; that's absurd, you know.  No young men, strangers to
business, are paid much to speak of.  Besides, I don't look to a
paltry clerk's pay.  Some day, when thoroughly acquainted with the
business (I shall learn it in about seven years), I shall go into a
good house with my capital and become junior partner."

"And meanwhile?"

"Meanwhile I conduct the foreign correspondence of the eminent
house of Jam, Ram, and Johnson; and very heavy it is, I can tell
you.  From nine till six every day, except foreign post days, and
then from nine till eleven.  Dirty dark court to sit in; snobs to
talk to,--great change, as you may fancy."

"And you do all this for nothing?"

"I do it to learn the business."  And so saying Protocol gave me a
knowing nod and went his way.

Good heavens! I thought, and is this a true story?  Are there
hundreds of young men in a similar situation at the present day,
giving away the best years of their youth for the sake of a mere
windy hope of something in old age, and dying before they come to
the goal?  In seven years he hopes to have a business, and then to
have the pleasure of risking his money?  He will be admitted into
some great house as a particular favor, and three months after the
house will fail.  Has it not happened to a thousand of our
acquaintance?  I thought I would run after him and tell him about
the new professions that I have invented.

"Oh! ay! those you wrote about in Fraser's Magazine.  Egad!
George, Necessity makes strange fellows of us all.  Who would ever
have thought of you SPELLING, much more writing?"

"Never mind that.  Will you, if I tell you of a new profession
that, with a little cleverness and instruction from me, you may
bring to a most successful end--will you, I say, make me a fair
return?"

"My dear creature," replied young Protocol, "what nonsense you
talk!  I saw that very humbug in the Magazine.  You say you have
made a great discovery--very good; you puff your discovery--very
right; you ask money for it--nothing can be more reasonable; and
then you say that you intend to make your discovery public in the
next number of the Magazine.  Do you think I will be such a fool as
to give you money for a thing which I can have next month for
nothing?  Good-by, George my boy; the NEXT discovery you make I'll
tell you how to get a better price for it."  And with this the
fellow walked off, looking supremely knowing and clever.

This tale of the person I have called Protocol is not told without
a purpose, you may be sure.  In the first place, it shows what are
the reasons that nobody has made application to me concerning the
new professions, namely, because I have passed my word to make them
known in this Magazine, which persons may have for the purchasing,
stealing, borrowing, or hiring, and, therefore, they will never
think of applying personally to me.  And, secondly, his story
proves also my assertion, viz, that all professions are most
cruelly crowded at present, and that men will make the most absurd
outlay and sacrifices for the smallest chance of success at some
future period.  Well, then, I will be a benefactor to my race, if I
cannot be to one single member of it, whom I love better than most
men.  What I have discovered I will make known; there shall be no
shilly-shallying work here, no circumlocution, no bottle-conjuring
business.  But oh! I wish for all our sakes that I had had an
opportunity to impart the secret to one or two persons only; for,
after all, but one or two can live in the manner I would suggest.
And when the discovery is made known, I am sure ten thousand will
try.  The rascals!  I can see their brass-plates gleaming over
scores of doors.  Competition will ruin my professions, as it has
all others.

It must be premised that the two professions are intended for
gentlemen, and gentlemen only--men of birth and education.  No
others could support the parts which they will be called upon to
play.

And, likewise, it must be honestly confessed that these professions
have, to a certain degree, been exercised before.  Do not cry out
at this and say it is no discovery!  I say it IS a discovery.  It
is a discovery if I show you--a gentleman--a profession which you
may exercise without derogation, or loss of standing, with certain
profit, nay, possibly with honor, and of which, until the reading
of this present page, you never thought but as of a calling beneath
your rank and quite below your reach.  Sir, I do not mean to say
that I create a profession.  I cannot create gold; but if, when
discovered, I find the means of putting it in your pocket, do I or
do I not deserve credit?

I see you sneer contemptuously when I mention to you the word
AUCTIONEER.  "Is this all," you say, "that this fellow brags and
prates about?  An auctioneer forsooth! he might as well have
'invented' chimney-sweeping!"

No such thing.  A little boy of seven, be he ever so low of birth,
can do this as well as you.  Do you suppose that little stolen
Master Montague made a better sweeper than the lowest-bred chummy
that yearly commemorates his release?  No, sir.  And he might have
been ever so much a genius or gentleman, and not have been able to
make his trade respectable.

But all such trades as can be rendered decent the aristocracy has
adopted one by one.  At first they followed the profession of arms,
flouting all others as unworthy, and thinking it ungentlemanlike to
know how to read or write.  They did not go into the church in very
early days, till the money to be got from the church was strong
enough to tempt them.  It is but of later years that they have
condescended to go to the bar, and since the same time only that we
see some of them following trades.  I know an English lord's son,
who is, or was, a wine-merchant (he may have been a bankrupt for
what I know).  As for bankers, several partners in banking-houses
have four balls to their coronets, and I have no doubt that another
sort of banking, viz, that practised by gentlemen who lend small
sums of money upon deposited securities, will be one day followed
by the noble order, so that they may have four balls on their
coronets and carriages, and three in front of their shops.

Yes, the nobles come peoplewards as the people, on the other hand,
rise and mingle with the nobles.  With the plebs, of course, Fitz-
Boodle, in whose veins flows the blood of a thousand kings, can
have nothing to do; but, watching the progress of the world, 'tis
impossible to deny that the good old days of our race are passed
away.  We want money still as much as ever we did; but we cannot go
down from our castles with horse and sword and waylay fat
merchants--no, no, confounded new policemen and the assize-courts
prevent that.  Younger brothers cannot be pages to noble houses, as
of old they were, serving gentle dames without disgrace, handing my
lord's rose-water to wash, or holding his stirrup as he mounted for
the chase.  A page, forsooth!  A pretty figure would George Fitz-
Boodle or any other man of fashion cut, in a jacket covered with
sugar-loafed buttons, and handing in penny-post notes on a silver
tray.  The plebs have robbed us of THAT trade among others: nor, I
confess, do I much grudge them their trouvaille.  Neither can we
collect together a few scores of free lances, like honest Hugh
Calverly in the Black Prince's time, or brave Harry Butler of
Wallenstein's dragoons, and serve this or that prince, Peter the
Cruel or Henry of Trastamare, Gustavus or the Emperor, at our
leisure; or, in default of service, fight and rob on our own
gallant account, as the good gentlemen of old did.  Alas! no.  In
South America or Texas, perhaps, a man might have a chance that
way; but in the ancient world no man can fight except in the king's
service (and a mighty bad service that is too), and the lowest
European sovereign, were it Baldomero Espartero himself, would
think nothing of seizing the best-born condottiere that ever drew
sword, and shooting him down like the vulgarest deserter.

What, then, is to be done?  We must discover fresh fields of
enterprise--of peaceable and commercial enterprise in a peaceful
and commercial age.  I say, then, that the auctioneer's pulpit has
never yet been ascended by a scion of the aristocracy, and am
prepared to prove that they might scale it, and do so with dignity
and profit.

For the auctioneer's pulpit is just the peculiar place where a man
of social refinement, of elegant wit, of polite perceptions, can
bring his wit, his eloquence, his taste, and his experience of
life, most delightfully into play.  It is not like the bar, where
the better and higher qualities of a man of fashion find no room
for exercise.  In defending John Jorrocks in an action of trespass,
for cutting down a stick in Sam Snooks's field, what powers of mind
do you require?--powers of mind, that is, which Mr. Serjeant
Snorter, a butcher's son with a great loud voice, a sizar at
Cambridge, a wrangler, and so forth, does not possess as well as
yourself?  Snorter has never been in decent society in his life.
He thinks the bar-mess the most fashionable assemblage in Europe,
and the jokes of "grand day" the ne plus ultra of wit.  Snorter
lives near Russell Square, eats beef and Yorkshire-pudding, is a
judge of port-wine, is in all social respects your inferior.  Well,
it is ten to one but in the case of Snooks v. Jorrocks, before
mentioned, he will be a better advocate than you; he knows the law
of the case entirely, and better probably than you.  He can speak
long, loud, to the point, grammatically--more grammatically than
you, no doubt, will condescend to do.  In the case of Snooks v.
Jorrocks he is all that can be desired.  And so about dry disputes,
respecting real property, he knows the law; and, beyond this, has
no more need to be a gentleman than my body-servant has--who, by
the way, from constant intercourse with the best society, IS almost
a gentleman.  But this is apart from the question.

Now, in the matter of auctioneering, this, I apprehend, is not the
case, and I assert that a high-bred gentleman, with good powers of
mind and speech, must, in such a profession, make a fortune.  I do
not mean in all auctioneering matters.  I do not mean that such a
person should be called upon to sell the good-will of a public-
house, or discourse about the value of the beer-barrels, or bars
with pewter fittings, or the beauty of a trade doing a stroke of so
many hogsheads a week.  I do not ask a gentleman to go down and
sell pigs, ploughs, and cart-horses, at Stoke Pogis; or to enlarge
at the Auction-Rooms, Wapping, upon the beauty of the "Lively
Sally" schooner.  These articles of commerce or use can be better
appreciated by persons in a different rank of life to his.

But there are a thousand cases in which a gentleman only can do
justice to the sale of objects which the necessity or convenience
of the genteel world may require to change hands.  All articles
properly called of taste should be put under his charge.
Pictures,--he is a travelled man, has seen and judged the best
galleries of Europe, and can speak of them as a common person
cannot.  For, mark you, you must have the confidence of your
society, you must be able to be familiar with them, to plant a
happy mot in a graceful manner, to appeal to my lord or the duchess
in such a modest, easy, pleasant way as that her grace should not
be hurt by your allusion to her--nay, amused (like the rest of the
company) by the manner in which it was done.

What is more disgusting than the familiarity of a snob?  What more
loathsome than the swaggering quackery of some present holders of
the hammer?  There was a late sale, for instance, which made some
noise in the world (I mean the late Lord Gimcrack's, at Dilberry
Hill).  Ah! what an opportunity was lost there!  I declare solemnly
that I believe, but for the absurd quackery and braggadocio of the
advertisements, much more money would have been bid; people were
kept away by the vulgar trumpeting of the auctioneer, and could not
help thinking the things were worthless that were so outrageously
lauded.

They say that sort of Bartholomew-fair advocacy (in which people
are invited to an entertainment by the medium of a hoarse yelling
beef-eater, twenty-four drums, and a jack-pudding turning head over
heels) is absolutely necessary to excite the public attention.
What an error!  I say that the refined individual so accosted is
more likely to close his ears, and, shuddering, run away from the
booth.  Poor Horace Waddlepoodle! to think that thy gentle
accumulation of bricabrac should have passed away in such a manner!
by means of a man who brings down a butterfly with a blunderbuss,
and talks of a pin's head through a speaking-trumpet!  Why, the
auctioneer's very voice was enough to crack the Sevres porcelain
and blow the lace into annihilation.  Let it be remembered that I
speak of the gentleman in his public character merely, meaning to
insinuate nothing more than I would by stating that Lord Brougham
speaks with a northern accent, or that the voice of Mr. Shell is
sometimes unpleasantly shrill.

Now the character I have formed to myself of a great auctioneer is
this.  I fancy him a man of first-rate and irreproachable birth and
fashion.  I fancy his person so agreeable that it must be a
pleasure for ladies to behold and tailors to dress it.  As a
private man he must move in the very best society, which will flock
round his pulpit when he mounts it in his public calling.  It will
be a privilege for vulgar people to attend the hall where he
lectures; and they will consider it an honor to be allowed to pay
their money for articles the value of which is stamped by his high
recommendation.  Nor can such a person be a mere fribble; nor can
any loose hanger-on of fashion imagine he may assume the character.
The gentleman auctioneer must be an artist above all, adoring his
profession; and adoring it, what must he not know?  He must have a
good knowledge of the history and language of all nations; not the
knowledge of the mere critical scholar, but of the lively and
elegant man of the world.  He will not commit the gross blunders of
pronunciation that untravelled Englishmen perpetrate; he will not
degrade his subject by coarse eulogy or sicken his audience with
vulgar banter.  He will know where to apply praise and wit
properly; he will have the tact only acquired in good society, and
know where a joke is in place, and how far a compliment may go.  He
will not outrageously and indiscriminately laud all objects
committed to his charge, for he knows the value of praise; that
diamonds, could we have them by the bushel, would be used as coals;
that above all, he has a character of sincerity to support; that he
is not merely the advocate of the person who employs him, but that
the public is his client too, who honors him and confides in him.
Ask him to sell a copy of Raffaelle for an original; a trumpery
modern Brussels counterfeit for real old Mechlin; some common
French forged crockery for the old delightful, delicate, Dresden
china; and he will quit you with scorn, or order his servant to
show you the door of his study.

Study, by the way,--no, "study" is a vulgar word; every word is
vulgar which a man uses to give the world an exaggerated notion of
himself or his condition.  When the wretched bagman, brought up to
give evidence before Judge Coltman, was asked what his trade was,
and replied that "he represented the house of Dobson and Hobson,"
he showed himself to be a vulgar, mean-souled wretch, and was most
properly reprimanded by his lordship.  To be a bagman is to be
humble, but not of necessity vulgar.  Pomposity is vulgar, to ape a
higher rank than your own is vulgar, for an ensign of militia to
call himself captain is vulgar, or for a bagman to style himself
the "representative" of Dobson and Hobson.  The honest auctioneer,
then, will not call his room his study; but his "private room," or
his office, or whatever may be the phrase commonly used among
auctioneers.

He will not for the same reason call himself (as once in a
momentary feeling of pride and enthusiasm for the profession I
thought he should)--he will not call himself an "advocate," but an
auctioneer.  There is no need to attempt to awe people by big
titles: let each man bear his own name without shame.  And a very
gentlemanlike and agreeable, though exceptional position (for it is
clear that there cannot be more than two of the class,) may the
auctioneer occupy.

He must not sacrifice his honesty, then, either for his own sake or
his clients', in any way, nor tell fibs about himself or them.  He
is by no means called upon to draw the long bow in their behalf;
all that his office obliges him to do--and let us hope his
disposition will lead him to do it also--is to take a favorable,
kindly, philanthropic view of the world; to say what can fairly be
said by a good-natured and ingenious man in praise of any article
for which he is desirous to awaken public sympathy.  And how
readily and pleasantly may this be done!  I will take upon myself,
for instance, to write an eulogium upon So-and-So's last novel,
which shall be every word of it true; and which work, though to
some discontented spirits it might appear dull, may be shown to be
really amusing and instructive,--nay, IS amusing and instructive,--
to those who have the art of discovering where those precious
qualities lie.

An auctioneer should have the organ of truth large; of imagination
and comparison, considerable; of wit, great; of benevolence,
excessively large.

And how happy might such a man be, and cause others to be!  He
should go through the world laughing, merry, observant, kind-
hearted.  He should love everything in the world, because his
profession regards everything.  With books of lighter literature
(for I do not recommend the genteel auctioneer to meddle with heavy
antiquarian and philological works) he should be elegantly
conversant, being able to give a neat history of the author, a
pretty sparkling kind criticism of the work, and an appropriate
eulogium upon the binding, which would make those people read who
never read before; or buy, at least, which is his first
consideration.  Of pictures we have already spoken.  Of china, of
jewelry, of gold-headed canes, valuable arms, picturesque
antiquities, with what eloquent entrainement might he not speak!
He feels every one of these things in his heart.  He has all the
tastes of the fashionable world.  Dr. Meyrick cannot be more
enthusiastic about an old suit of armor than he; Sir Harris Nicolas
not more eloquent regarding the gallant times in which it was worn,
and the brave histories connected with it.  He takes up a pearl
necklace with as much delight as any beauty who was sighing to wear
it round her own snowy throat, and hugs a china monster with as
much joy as the oldest duchess could do.  Nor must he affect these
things; he must feel them.  He is a glass in which all the tastes
of fashion are reflected.  He must be every one of the characters
to whom he addresses himself--a genteel Goethe or Shakspeare, a
fashionable world-spirit.

How can a man be all this and not be a gentleman; and not have had
an education in the midst of the best company--an insight into the
most delicate feelings, and wants, and usages?  The pulpit oratory
of such a man would be invaluable; people would flock to listen to
him from far and near.  He might out of a single teacup cause
streams of world-philosophy to flow, which would be drunk in by
grateful thousands; and draw out of an old pincushion points of
wit, morals, and experience, that would make a nation wise.

Look round, examine THE ANNALS OF AUCTIONS, as Mr. Robins remarks,
and (with every respect for him and his brethren) say, is there in
the profession SUCH A MAN?  Do we want such a man?  Is such a man
likely or not likely to make an immense fortune?  Can we get such a
man except out of the very best society, and among the most favored
there?

Everybody answers "No!"  I knew you would answer no.  And now,
gentlemen who have laughed at my pretension to discover a
profession, say, have I not?  I have laid my finger upon the spot
where the social deficit exists.  I have shown that we labor under
a want; and when the world wants, do we not know that a man will
step forth to fill the vacant space that Fate has left for him?
Pass we now to the--


SECOND PROFESSION.


This profession, too, is a great, lofty and exceptional one, and
discovered by me considering these things, and deeply musing upon
the necessities of society.  Nor let honorable gentlemen imagine
that I am enabled to offer them in this profession, more than any
other, a promise of what is called future glory, deathless fame,
and so forth.  All that I say is, that I can put young men in the
way of making a comfortable livelihood, and leaving behind them,
not a name, but what is better, a decent maintenance to their
children.  Fitz-Boodle is as good a name as any in England.
General Fitz-Boodle, who, in Marlborough's time, and in conjunction
with the famous Van Slaap, beat the French in the famous action of
Vischzouchee, near Mardyk, in Holland, on the 14th of February,
1709, is promised an immortality upon his tomb in Westminster
Abbey; but he died of apoplexy, deucedly in debt, two years
afterwards: and what after that is the use of a name?

No, no; the age of chivalry is past.  Take the twenty-four first
men who come into the club, and ask who they are, and how they made
their money?  There's Woolsey-Sackville: his father was Lord
Chancellor, and sat on the woolsack, whence he took his title; his
grandfather dealt in coal-sacks, and not in woolsacks,--small coal-
sacks, dribbling out little supplies of black diamonds to the poor.
Yonder comes Frank Leveson, in a huge broad-brimmed hat, his shirt-
cuffs turned up to his elbows.  Leveson is as gentlemanly a fellow
as the world contains, and if he has a fault, is perhaps too
finikin.  Well, you fancy him related to the Sutherland family:
nor, indeed, does honest Frank deny it; but entre nous, my good
sir, his father was an attorney, and his grandfather a bailiff in
Chancery Lane, bearing a name still older than that of Leveson,
namely, Levy.  So it is that this confounded equality grows and
grows, and has laid the good old nobility by the heels.  Look at
that venerable Sir Charles Kitely, of Kitely Park: he is interested
about the Ashantees, and is just come from Exeter Hall.  Kitely
discounted bills in the City in the year 1787, and gained his
baronetcy by a loan to the French princes.  All these points of
history are perfectly well known; and do you fancy the world cares?
Psha!  Profession is no disgrace to a man: be what you like,
provided you succeed.  If Mr. Fauntleroy could come to life with a
million of money, you and I would dine with him: you know we would;
for why should we be better than our neighbors?

Put, then, out of your head the idea that this or that profession
is unworthy of you: take any that may bring you profit, and thank
him that puts you in the way of being rich.

The profession I would urge (upon a person duly qualified to
undertake it) has, I confess, at the first glance, something
ridiculous about it; and will not appear to young ladies so
romantic as the calling of a gallant soldier, blazing with glory,
gold lace, and vermilion coats; or a dear delightful clergyman,
with a sweet blue eye, and a pocket-handkerchief scented charmingly
with lavender-water.  The profession I allude to WILL, I own, be to
young women disagreeable, to sober men trivial, to great stupid
moralists unworthy.

But mark my words for it, that in the religious world (I have once
or twice, by mistake no doubt, had the honor of dining in "serious"
houses, and can vouch for the fact that the dinners there are of
excellent quality)--in the serious world, in the great mercantile
world, among the legal community (notorious feeders), in every
house in town (except some half-dozen which can afford to do
without such aid), the man I propose might speedily render himself
indispensable.

Does the reader now begin to take?  Have I hinted enough for him
that he may see with eagle glance the immense beauty of the
profession I am about to unfold to him?  We have all seen Gunter
and Chevet; Fregoso, on the Puerta del Sol (a relation of the ex-
Minister Calomarde), is a good purveyor enough for the benighted
olla-eaters of Madrid; nor have I any fault to find with Guimard, a
Frenchman, who has lately set up in the Toledo, at Naples, where he
furnishes people with decent food.  It has given me pleasure, too,
in walking about London--in the Strand, in Oxford Street, and
elsewhere, to see fournisseurs and comestible-merchants newly set
up.  Messrs. Morel have excellent articles in their warehouses;
Fortnum and Mason are known to most of my readers.

But what is not known, what is wanted, what is languished for in
England is a DINNER-MASTER,--a gentleman who is not a provider of
meat or wine, like the parties before named, who can have no
earthly interest in the price of truffled turkeys or dry champagne
beyond that legitimate interest which he may feel for his client,
and which leads him to see that the latter is not cheated by his
tradesmen.  For the dinner-giver is almost naturally an ignorant
man.  How in mercy's name can Mr. Serjeant Snorter, who is all day
at Westminster, or in chambers, know possibly the mysteries, the
delicacy, of dinner-giving?  How can Alderman Pogson know anything
beyond the fact that venison is good with currant jelly, and that
he likes lots of green fat with his turtle?  Snorter knows law,
Pogson is acquainted with the state of the tallow-market; but what
should he know of eating, like you and me, who have given up our
time to it?  (I say ME only familiarly, for I have only reached so
far in the science as to know that I know nothing.)  But men there
are, gifted individuals, who have spent years of deep thought--not
merely intervals of labor, but hours of study every day--over the
gormandizing science,--who, like alchemists, have let their
fortunes go, guinea by guinea, into the all-devouring pot,--who,
ruined as they sometimes are, never get a guinea by chance but they
will have a plate of pease in May with it, or a little feast of
ortolans, or a piece of Glo'ster salmon, or one more flask from
their favorite claret-bin.

It is not the ruined gastronomist that I would advise a person to
select as his TABLE-MASTER; for the opportunities of peculation
would be too great in a position of such confidence--such complete
abandonment of one man to another.  A ruined man would be making
bargains with the tradesmen.  They would offer to cash bills for
him, or send him opportune presents of wine, which he could convert
into money, or bribe him in one way or another.  Let this be done,
and the profession of table-master is ruined.  Snorter and Pogson
may almost as well order their own dinners, as be at the mercy of a
"gastronomic agent" whose faith is not beyond all question.

A vulgar mind, in reply to these remarks regarding the gastronomic
ignorance of Snorter and Pogson, might say, "True, these gentlemen
know nothing of household economy, being occupied with other more
important business elsewhere.  But what are their wives about?
Lady Pogson in Harley Street has nothing earthly to do but to mind
her poodle, and her mantua-maker's and housekeeper's bills.  Mrs.
Snorter in Belford Place, when she has taken her drive in the Park
with the young ladies, may surely have time to attend to her
husband's guests and preside over the preparations of his kitchen,
as she does worthily at his hospitable mahogany."  To this I
answer, that a man who expects a woman to understand the philosophy
of dinner-giving, shows the strongest evidence of a low mind.  He
is unjust towards that lovely and delicate creature, woman, to
suppose that she heartily understands and cares for what she eats
and drinks.  No: taken as a rule, women have no real appetites.
They are children in the gormandizing way; loving sugar, sops,
tarts, trifles, apricot-creams, and such gewgaws.  They would take
a sip of Malmsey, and would drink currant-wine just as happily, if
that accursed liquor were presented to them by the butler.  Did you
ever know a woman who could lay her fair hand upon her gentle heart
and say on her conscience that she preferred dry sillery to
sparkling champagne?  Such a phenomenon does not exist.  They are
not made for eating and drinking; or, if they make a pretence to
it, become downright odious.  Nor can they, I am sure, witness the
preparations of a really great repast without a certain jealousy.
They grudge spending money (ask guards, coachmen, inn-waiters,
whether this be not the case).  They will give their all, heaven
bless them to serve a son, a grandson, or a dear relative, but they
have not the heart to pay for small things magnificently.  They are
jealous of good dinners, and no wonder.  I have shown in a former
discourse how they are jealous of smoking, and other personal
enjoyments of the male.  I say, then, that Lady Pogson or Mrs.
Snorter can never conduct their husbands' table properly.  Fancy
either of them consenting to allow a calf to be stewed down into
gravy for one dish, or a dozen hares to be sacrificed to a single
puree of game, or the best Madeira to be used for a sauce, or half
a dozen of champagne to boil a ham in.  They will be for bringing a
bottle of Marsala in place of the old particular, or for having the
ham cooked in water.  But of these matters--of kitchen philosophy--
I have no practical or theoretic knowledge; and must beg pardon if,
only understanding the goodness of a dish when cooked, I may have
unconsciously made some blunder regarding the preparation.

Let it, then, be set down as an axiom, without further trouble of
demonstration, that a woman is a bad dinner-caterer; either too
great and simple for it, or too mean--I don't know which it is; and
gentlemen, according as they admire or contemn the sex, may settle
that matter their own way.  In brief, the mental constitution of
lovely woman is such that she cannot give a great dinner.  It must
be done by a man.  It can't be done by an ordinary man, because he
does not understand it.  Vain fool! and he sends off to the pastry-
cook in Great Russell Street or Baker Street, he lays on a couple
of extra waiters (green-grocers in the neighborhood), he makes a
great pother with his butler in the cellar, and fancies he has done
the business.

Bon Dieu!  Who has not been at those dinners?--those monstrous
exhibitions of the pastry-cook's art?  Who does not know those made
dishes with the universal sauce to each: fricandeaux, sweet-breads,
damp dumpy cutlets, &c., seasoned with the compound of grease,
onions, bad port-wine, cayenne pepper, curry-powder (Warren's
blacking, for what I know, but the taste is always the same)--there
they lie in the old corner dishes, the poor wiry Moselle and
sparkling Burgundy in the ice-coolers, and the old story of white
and brown soup, turbot, little smelts, boiled turkey, saddle-of-
mutton, and so forth?  "Try a little of that fricandeau," says Mrs.
Snorter, with a kind smile.  "You'll find it, I think, very nice."
Be sure it has come in a green tray from Great Russell Street.
"Mr. Fitz-Boodle, you have been in Germany," cries Snorter,
knowingly; "taste the hock, and tell me what you think of THAT."

How should he know better, poor benighted creature; or she, dear
good soul that she is?  If they would have a leg-of-mutton and an
apple-pudding, and a glass of sherry and port (or simple brandy-
and-water called by its own name) after dinner, all would be very
well; but they must shine, they must dine as their neighbors.
There is no difference in the style of dinners in London; people
with five hundred a year treat you exactly as those of five
thousand.  They WILL have their Moselle or hock, their fatal side-
dishes brought in the green trays from the pastry-cook's.

Well, there is no harm done; not as regards the dinner-givers at
least, though the dinner-eaters may have to suffer somewhat; it
only shows that the former are hospitably inclined, and wish to do
the very best in their power,--good honest fellows!  If they do
wrong, how can they help it? they know no better.

And now, is it not as clear as the sun at noonday, that A WANT
exists in London for a superintendent of the table--a gastronomic
agent--a dinner-master, as I have called him before?  A man of such
a profession would be a metropolitan benefit; hundreds of thousands
of people of the respectable sort, people in white waistcoats,
would thank him daily.  Calculate how many dinners are given in the
City of London, and calculate the numbers of benedictions that "the
Agency" might win.

And as no doubt the observant man of the world has remarked that
the freeborn Englishman of the respectable class is, of all others,
the most slavish and truckling to a lord; that there is no fly-
blown peer but he is pleased to have him at his table, proud beyond
measure to call him by his surname (without the lordly prefix); and
that those lords whom he does not know, he yet (the freeborn
Englishman) takes care to have their pedigrees and ages by heart
from his world-bible, the "Peerage:" as this is an indisputable
fact, and as it is in this particular class of Britons that our
agent must look to find clients, I need not say it is necessary
that the agent should be as high-born as possible, and that he
should be able to tack, if possible, an honorable or some other
handle to his respectable name.  He must have it on his
professional card--


      THE HONORABLE GEORGE GORMAND GOBBLETON,

          Apician Chambers, Pall Mall.


Or,


       SIR AUGUSTUS CARVER CRAMLEY CRAMLEY,

    Amphitryonic Council Office, Swallow Street.


or, in some such neat way, Gothic letters on a large handsome
crockeryware card, with possibly a gilt coat-of-arms and
supporters, or the blood-red hand of baronetcy duly displayed.
Depend on it plenty of guineas will fall in it, and that
Gobbleton's supporters will support him comfortably enough.

For this profession is not like that of the auctioneer, which I
take to be a far more noble one, because more varied and more
truthful; but in the Agency case, a little humbug at least is
necessary.  A man cannot be a successful agent by the mere force of
his simple merit or genius in eating and drinking.  He must of
necessity impose upon the vulgar to a certain degree.  He must be
of that rank which will lead them naturally to respect him,
otherwise they might be led to jeer at his profession; but let a
noble exercise it, and bless your soul, all the "Court Guide" is
dumb!

He will then give out in a manly and somewhat pompous address what
has before been mentioned, namely, that he has seen the fatal way
in which the hospitality of England has been perverted hitherto,
accapare'd by a few cooks with green trays.  (He must use a good
deal of French in his language, for that is considered very
gentlemanlike by vulgar people.)  He will take a set of chambers in
Canton Gardens, which will be richly though severely furnished, and
the door of which will be opened by a French valet (he MUST be a
Frenchman, remember), who will say, on letting Mr. Snorter or Sir
Benjamin Pogson in, that "MILOR is at home."  Pogson will then be
shown into a library furnished with massive bookcases, containing
all the works on cookery and wines (the titles of them) in all the
known languages in the world.  Any books, of course, will do, as
you will have them handsomely bound, and keep them under plate-
glass.  On a side-table will be little sample-bottles of wine, a
few truffles on a white porcelain saucer, a prodigious strawberry
or two, perhaps, at the time when such fruit costs much money.  On
the library will be busts marked Ude, Careme, Bechamel, in marble
(never mind what heads, of course); and, perhaps, on the clock
should be a figure of the Prince of Conde's cook killing himself
because the fish had not arrived in time: there may be a wreath of
immortelles on the figure to give it a more decidedly Frenchified
air.  The walls will be of a dark rich paper, hung round with neat
gilt frames, containing plans of menus of various great dinners,
those of Cambaceres, Napoleon, Louis XIV., Louis XVIII.,
Heliogabalus if you like, each signed by the respective cook.

After the stranger has looked about him at these things, which he
does not understand in the least, especially the truffles, which
look like dirty potatoes, you will make your appearance, dressed in
a dark dress, with one handsome enormous gold chain, and one large
diamond ring; a gold snuff-box, of course, which you will thrust
into the visitor's paw before saying a word.  You will be yourself
a portly grave man, with your hair a little bald and gray.  In
fact, in this, as in all other professions, you had best try to
look as like Canning as you can.

When Pogson has done sneezing with the snuff, you will say to him,
"Take a fauteuil.  I have the honor of addressing Sir Benjamin
Pogson, I believe?"  And then you will explain to him your system.

This, of course, must vary with every person you address.  But let
us lay down a few of the heads of a plan which may be useful, or
may be modified infinitely, or may be cast aside altogether, just
as circumstances dictate.  After all I am not going to turn
gastronomic agent, and speak only for the benefit perhaps of the
very person who is reading this:--


"SYNOPSIS OF THE GASTRONOMIC AGENCY OF THE HONORABLE GEORGE GOBBLETON.


"The Gastronomic Agent having traversed Europe, and dined with the
best society of the world, has been led naturally, as a patriot, to
turn his thoughts homeward, and cannot but deplore the lamentable
ignorance regarding gastronomy displayed in a country for which
Nature has done almost everything.

"But it is ever singularly thus.  Inherent ignorance belongs to
man; and The Agent, in his Continental travels, has always
remarked, that the countries most fertile in themselves were
invariably worse tilled than those more barren.  The Italians and
the Spaniards leave their fields to Nature, as we leave our
vegetables, fish, and meat.  And, heavens! what richness do we
fling away, what dormant qualities in our dishes do we disregard,--
what glorious gastronomic crops (if the Agent may be permitted the
expression)--what glorious gastronomic crops do we sacrifice,
allowing our goodly meats and fishes to lie fallow!  'Chance,' it
is said by an ingenious historian, who, having been long a
secretary in the East India House, must certainly have had access
to the best information upon Eastern matters--'Chance,' it is said
by Mr. Charles Lamb, 'which burnt down a Chinaman's house, with a
litter of sucking-pigs that were unable to escape from the
interior, discovered to the world the excellence of roast-pig.'
Gunpowder, we know, was invented by a similar fortuity."  [The
reader will observe that my style in the supposed character of a
Gastronomic Agent is purposely pompous and loud.]  "So, 'tis said,
was printing,--so glass.--We should have drunk our wine poisoned
with the villanous odor of the borachio, had not some Eastern
merchants, lighting their fires in the Desert, marked the strange
composition which now glitters on our sideboards, and holds the
costly produce of our vines.

"We have spoken of the natural riches of a country.  Let the reader
think but for one moment of the gastronomic wealth of our country
of England, and he will be lost in thankful amazement as he watches
the astonishing riches poured out upon us from Nature's bounteous
cornucopia!  Look at our fisheries!--the trout and salmon tossing
in our brawling streams; the white and full-breasted turbot
struggling in the mariner's net; the purple lobster lured by hopes
of greed into his basket-prison, which he quits only for the red
ordeal of the pot.  Look at whitebait, great heavens!--look at
whitebait, and a thousand frisking, glittering, silvery things
besides, which the nymphs of our native streams bear kindly to the
deities of our kitchens--our kitchens such as they are.

"And though it may be said that other countries produce the
freckle-backed salmon and the dark broad-shouldered turbot; though
trout frequent many a stream besides those of England, and lobsters
sprawl on other sands than ours; yet, let it be remembered, that
our native country possesses these altogether, while other lands
only know them separately; that, above all, whitebait is peculiarly
our country's--our city's own!  Blessings and eternal praises be on
it, and, of course, on brown bread and butter!  And the Briton
should further remember, with honest pride and thankfulness, the
situation of his capital, of London: the lordly turtle floats from
the sea into the stream, and from the stream to the city; the rapid
fleets of all the world se donnent rendezvous in the docks of our
silvery Thames; the produce of our coasts and provincial cities,
east and west, is borne to us on the swift lines of lightning
railroads.  In a word--and no man but one who, like The Agent, has
travelled Europe over, can appreciate the gift--there is no city on
earth's surface so well supplied with fish as London!

"With respect to our meats, all praise is supererogatory.  Ask the
wretched hunter of chevreuil, the poor devourer of rehbraten, what
they think of the noble English haunch, that, after bounding in the
Park of Knole or Windsor, exposes its magnificent flank upon some
broad silver platter at our tables?  It is enough to say of foreign
venison, that THEY ARE OBLIGED TO LARD IT.  Away! ours is the palm
of roast; whether of the crisp mutton that crops the thymy herbage
of our downs, or the noble ox who revels on lush Althorpian oil-
cakes.  What game is like to ours?  Mans excels us in poultry, 'tis
true; but 'tis only in merry England that the partridge has a
flavor, that the turkey can almost se passer de truffes, that the
jolly juicy goose can be eaten as he deserves.

"Our vegetables, moreover, surpass all comment; Art (by the means
of glass) has wrung fruit out of the bosom of Nature, such as she
grants to no other clime.  And if we have no vineyards on our
hills, we have gold to purchase their best produce.  Nature, and
enterprise that masters Nature, have done everything for our land.

"But, with all these prodigious riches in our power, is it not
painful to reflect how absurdly we employ them?  Can we say that we
are in the habit of dining well?  Alas, no! and The Agent, roaming
o'er foreign lands, and seeing how, with small means and great
ingenuity and perseverance, great ends were effected, comes back
sadly to his own country, whose wealth he sees absurdly wasted,
whose energies are misdirected, and whose vast capabilities are
allowed to lie idle. . . ."  [Here should follow what I have only
hinted at previously, a vivid and terrible picture of the
degradation of our table.]  ". . . Oh, for a master spirit, to give
an impetus to the land, to see its great power directed in the
right way, and its wealth not squandered or hidden, but nobly put
out to interest and spent!

"The Agent dares not hope to win that proud station--to be the
destroyer of a barbarous system wallowing in abusive prodigality--
to become a dietetic reformer--the Luther of the table.

"But convinced of the wrongs which exist, he will do his humble
endeavor to set them right, and to those who know that they are
ignorant (and this is a vast step to knowledge) he offers his
counsels, his active co-operation, his frank and kindly sympathy.
The Agent's qualifications are these:--

"1.  He is of one of the best families in England; and has in
himself, or through his ancestors, been accustomed to good living
for centuries.  In the reign of Henry V., his maternal great-great-
grandfather, Roger de Gobylton" [the name may be varied, of course,
or the king's reign, or the dish invented], "was the first who
discovered the method of roasting a peacock whole, with his tail-
feathers displayed; and the dish was served to the two kings at
Rouen.  Sir Walter Cramley, in Elizabeth's reign, produced before
her Majesty, when at Killingworth Castle, mackerel with the famous
GOOSEBERRY SAUCE, &c.

"2.  He has, through life, devoted himself to no other study than
that of the table: and has visited to that end the courts of all
the monarchs of Europe: taking the receipts of the cooks, with whom
he lives on terms of intimate friendship, often at enormous expense
to himself.

"3.  He has the same acquaintance with all the vintages of the
Continent; having passed the autumn of 1811 (the comet year) on the
great Weinberg of Johannisberg; being employed similarly at
Bordeaux, in 1834; at Oporto, in 1820; and at Xeres de la Frontera,
with his excellent friends, Duff, Gordon and Co., the year after.
He travelled to India and back in company with fourteen pipes of
Madeira (on board of the Samuel Snob' East Indiaman, Captain
Scuttler, and spent the vintage season in the island, with
unlimited powers of observation granted to him by the great houses
there.

"4.  He has attended Mr. Groves of Charing Cross, and Mr. Giblett
of Bond Street, in a course of purchases of fish and meat; and is
able at a glance to recognize the age of mutton, the primeness of
beef, the firmness and freshness of fish of all kinds.

"5.  He has visited the parks, the grouse-manors, and the principal
gardens of England, in a similar professional point of view."


The Agent then, through his subordinates, engages to provide
gentlemen who are about to give dinner-parties--

" 1.  With cooks to dress the dinners; a list of which gentlemen he
has by him, and will recommend none who are not worthy of the
strictest confidence.

"2.  With a menu for the table, according to the price which the
Amphitryon chooses to incur.

"3.  He will, through correspondence, with the various fournisseurs
of the metropolis, provide them with viands, fruit, wine, &c.,
sending to Paris, if need be, where he has a regular correspondence
with Messrs. Chevet.

"4.  He has a list of dexterous table-waiters (all answering to the
name of John for fear of mistakes, the butler's name to be settled
according to pleasure), and would strongly recommend that the
servants of the house should be locked in the back-kitchen or
servants' hall during the time the dinner takes place.

"5.  He will receive and examine all the accounts of the
fournisseurs,--of course pledging his honor as a gentleman not to
receive one shilling of paltry gratification from the tradesmen he
employs, but to see that the bills are more moderate, and their
goods of better quality, than they would provide to any person of
less experience than himself.

"6.  His fee for superintending a dinner will be five guineas: and
The Agent entreats his clients to trust ENTIRELY to him and his
subordinates for the arrangement of the repast,--NOT TO THINK of
inserting dishes of their own invention, or producing wine from
their own cellars, as he engages to have it brought in the best
order, and fit for immediate drinking.  Should the Amphitryon,
however, desire some particular dish or wine, he must consult The
Agent in the first case by writing, in the second, by sending a
sample to The Agent's chambers.  For it is manifest that the whole
complexion of a dinner may be altered by the insertion of a single
dish; and, therefore, parties will do well to mention their wishes
on the first interview with The Agent.  He cannot be called upon to
recompose his bill of fare, except at great risk to the ensemble of
the dinner and enormous inconvenience to himself.

"7.  The Agent will be at home for consultation from ten o'clock
until two, earlier if gentlemen who are engaged at early hours in
the City desire to have an interview: and be it remembered, that a
PERSONAL INTERVIEW is always the best: for it is greatly necessary
to know not only the number but the character of the guests whom
the Amphitryon proposes to entertain,--whether they are fond of any
particular wine or dish, what is their state of health, rank,
style, profession, &c.

8.  At two o'clock, he will commence his rounds; for as the
metropolis is wide, it is clear that he must be early in the field
in some districts.  From 2 to 3 he will be in Russell Square and
the neighborhood; 3 to 3 3/4, Harley Street, Portland Place,
Cavendish Square, and the environs; 3 3/4 to 4 1/4, Portman Square,
Gloucester Place, Baker Street, &c.; 4 1/4 to 5, the new district
about Hyde Park Terrace; 5 to 5 3/4, St. John's Wood and the
Regent's Park.  He will be in Grosvenor Square by 6, and in
Belgrave Square, Pimlico, and its vicinity, by 7.  Parties there
are requested not to dine until 8 o'clock; and The Agent, once for
all, peremptorily announces that he will NOT go to the palace,
where it is utterly impossible to serve a good dinner."

"TO TRADESMEN.

"Every Monday evening during the season the Gastronomic Agent
proposes to give a series of trial-dinners, to which the principal
gormands of the metropolis, and a few of The Agent's most
respectable clients, will be invited.  Covers will be laid for TEN
at nine o'clock precisely.  And as The Agent does not propose to
exact a single shilling of profit from their bills, and as his
recommendation will be of infinite value to them, the tradesmen he
employs will furnish the weekly dinner gratis.  Cooks will attend
(who have acknowledged characters) upon the same terms.  To save
trouble, a book will be kept where butchers, poulterers,
fishmongers, &c. may inscribe their names in order, taking it by
turns to supply the trial-table.  Wine-merchants will naturally
compete every week promiscuously, sending what they consider their
best samples, and leaving with the hall-porter tickets of the
prices.  Confectionery to be done out of the house.  Fruiterers,
market-men, as butchers and poulterers.  The Agent's maitre-d'hotel
will give a receipt to each individual for the articles he
produces; and let all remember that The Agent is a VERY KEEN JUDGE,
and woe betide those who serve him or his clients ill!

"GEORGE GORMAND GOBBLETON.

"CARLTON GARDENS, June 10, 1842."


Here I have sketched out the heads of such an address as I conceive
a gastronomic agent might put forth; and appeal pretty confidently
to the British public regarding its merits and my own discovery.
If this be not a profession--a new one--a feasible one--a lucrative
one,--I don't know what is.  Say that a man attends but fifteen
dinners daily, that is seventy-five guineas, or five hundred and
fifty pounds weekly, or fourteen thousand three hundred pounds for
a season of six months: and how many of our younger sons have such
a capital even?  Let, then, some unemployed gentleman with the
requisite qualifications come forward.  It will not be necessary
that he should have done all that is stated in the prospectus; but,
at any rate, let him SAY he has: there can't be much harm in an
innocent fib of that sort; for the gastronomic agent must be a sort
of dinner-pope, whose opinions cannot be supposed to err.

And as he really will be an excellent judge of eating and drinking,
and will bring his whole mind to bear upon the question, and will
speedily acquire an experience which no person out of the
profession can possibly have; and as, moreover, he will be an
honorable man, not practising upon his client in any way, or
demanding sixpence beyond his just fee, the world will gain vastly
by the coming forward of such a person,--gain in good dinners, and
absolutely save money: for what is five guineas for a dinner of
sixteen?  The sum may be gaspille by a cook-wench, or by one of
those abominable before-named pastry-cooks with their green trays.

If any man take up the business, he will invite me, of course, to
the Monday dinners.  Or does ingratitude go so far as that a man
should forget the author of his good fortune?  I believe it does.
Turn we away from the sickening theme!


And now, having concluded my professions, how shall I express my
obligations to the discriminating press of this country for the
unanimous applause which hailed my first appearance?  It is the
more wonderful, as I pledge my sacred word, I never wrote a
document before much longer than a laundress's bill, or the
acceptance of an invitation to dinner.  But enough of this egotism:
thanks for praise conferred sound like vanity; gratitude is hard to
speak of, and at present it swells the full heart of

GEORGE SAVAGE FITZ-BOODLE.





End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Fitz-Boodle Papers, by Thackeray

