City Sketches. 573 



obliging: Grasp is one of the best friends I have; and as for Shark, 

 I am sure of him." 



The worthy couple having talked and retalked, and canvassed and 

 argued the various matters connected with this unpleasant business, 

 till the candles went into fits that threatened immediate dissolution, 

 betook themselves to bed, there to renew the subject; but with no 

 better success. 



Mr. Walton was a Silkman and resided in Aldermanbury. On the 

 death of his father he succeeded to a good business, and a few thou- 

 sand pounds; and, about three years afterwards, contrived, but not 

 without much difficulty, to acquire a wife, Old Blunt, the father of 

 the bride, having growled a very uncomplimentary consent to the 

 match. The truth is, the old gentleman, amongst other partialities 

 and prejudices which sometimes are discoverable in old gentlemen 

 who can afford to do as they please, was extremely attached to his 

 eldest daughter, and by no means so to the man whom she had selected 

 for a husband. He thought him too young, too volatile, too gay ; he 

 wondered what could possess the coxcombs of the present day, to live 

 at the rate they did; and Walton was decidedly too expensive. These 

 were eerious charges, and old Blunt unfortunately had grounds for 

 making them. Walton was at the period of his marriage very young 

 and by no means averse from the pursuit of pleasure, and perhaps he 

 did live in a style rather too expensive for his income. But when he 

 took a house at Highbury and set up a gig, Blunt was inexorable. 

 He refused to see his son-in-law, would never walk within a mile of 

 the house at Highbury, and was completely upset by the gig. 



Walton, it is true, in a short time perceived the folly of his pro- 

 ceedings. He gave up the house, sold the gig, and by assiduous 

 attention to business endeavoured to keep together a connexion which 

 the badness of trade caused by the recent panic had rendered rather 

 insecure. But he was too proud to make advances to old Blunt, and 

 the latter was too obstinate to meet him half-way, had he done so. At 

 the time, then, of which we write, these two parties may be considered 

 to have been on rather questionable terms ; a constrained civility on 

 one side, and a morose grufFness on the other. 



It was with no slight degree of nervous trepidation that Walton 

 wrote and despatched by the hand of his clerk, the several letters to his 

 creditors conveying to them the unpleasant fact that he was about to 

 call them together. How old Blunt would chuckle, would gloat, as it 

 were, over his misfortunes was a conviction of painful certainty to 

 him. Scarcely more pleasant was it to him to reflect on the pro- 

 bable behaviour of his friends Eager, Grasp, and Shark, upon this 

 distressing occasion. He beheld Eager pressing his hand with sym- 

 pathizing cordiality. He saw the big tear steal down the long face, 

 made longer than usual by this circumstance of the worthy Grasp; 

 he heard the tones of tender condolence which flowed, or would flow, 

 from the tongue of the almost too sensitive and peculiarly amiable 

 Shark. Walton was a man of a rather excitable temperament, and 

 his heart was oppressed by a sense of pleasing pain when he recalled 

 to mind the former conduct of his friends, which augured so nobly 

 of their conduct to come. 



