1830.] The Rising Generation, and the March of Mind. 291 



is a something about the foreign cut for me/' " Oh, oh/' said I, 

 scarcely able to avoid the indecorum of laughing in the face of the man of 

 taste, " you wish me to run up a bill with Stultz ; but I always pay 

 ready money, and have no bills with any one." " Have no bills ?" mur- 

 mured the fellow, with irrepressible scorn. He gave me warning within 

 the week, and, to do him justice, I lost none of my silver spoons. 



Some business having led me across the Channel, and having kept me 

 there until I thought that I should never get the snuffling of French out 

 of my ears, nor the fume of the most villainous tobacco on earth out of 

 my nostrils, I hurried homewards with the sort of delight that a prisoner 

 may feel escaping from the society, sight, scents, and sounds of a Deptford 

 hulk. " Here," thought I, as I sat down before my own household gods, 

 drew my chair to the fire, and looking on an unpolluted carpet, a clear 

 blaze, and a bottle of old port, felt that I was at last in England again, 

 " here I am in the land of comfort and common sense. Here I can sit 

 without being smoked into an asthma, or chattered, grimaced, and 

 grinned into an apoplexy." The congratulation was interrupted by a 

 prodigious double or fourfold knock at the hall door, which prepared 

 me to expect the visit of a peer at least, by its shattering every nerve in 

 my frame. I rose to receive my august visitor. A personage stately as 

 a field marshal, was ushered into the room, in a magnificent military 

 cloak, with a very finished specimen of sleek moustache on his lip, and 

 the remnant of a cigar between them. Having relieved himself of his 

 superabundant smoke, he, by a discharge in my face, addressed me ; 

 dropped a few sentences about nouveautes, la mode, and le supreme bon 

 ton, strung like jewels on some of the most thorough English of Cheap- 

 side, and threw open his military caparison. The gentleman was my 

 tailor's apprentice, bringing home a pair of breeches. 



This w r as a day of general discovery. In my rovings through the 

 house, left untenanted by the absence of my family in the country, I 

 found the upper rooms strongly smelling of turpentine, mastic, and so 

 forth ; a varnish brush lay on my toilet table, and a fragment of a carmine 

 saucer, satisfied me that other sophistications than my own had been 

 going on there. The story was soon told. My cook had selected the 

 apartment from its being more convenient than the kitchen for rouging 

 herself without inspection ; and my housemaid had selected it for its 

 advantage of a northern aspect, in the lessons which she was taking of 

 an " eminent artist," who gave lessons in oil painting and varnishing, at 

 the rate of half-a-erown a piece. Opening a closet, which I had fitted 

 up as a small study, with my best books, and from which I enjoyed a 

 prospect over Hyde Park, I was repelled by a combination of odours 

 that made me think myself on the other side of the Channel again. My 

 coachman, a huge fellow from Yorkshire, had honoured it in my absence 

 by his company. To this spot the philosopher of hay and oats was in 

 the habit of retiring to solace himself with copying the style of Richard- 

 son's love letters, of which I found several brilliant specimens sketching 

 his observations on the margin of Smirke'S edition of Don Quixote, and 

 eating maccaroni of which I found a ready prepared plate, with a cigar 

 burning by its side ; my return having evidently disturbed Jehu 

 in his retirement. In this emergency, what was J to do ? My servants 

 had evidently so far outwalked me in tc the march," that it would have 

 been the highest degree of injustice to expect their further attendance. 

 I ought indeed rather to have petitioned to clean the shoes and make th 



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