THE SIX OF SPADES. Ill 



tardy but devoted allegiance. Or, as a pupil at 

 Dotheboys Hall would be requested, after spelling 

 the word " horse," to go and clean the quadruped in 

 question, so I went from description to reality, first 

 studying the portraits in my book of beauty, and then 

 doing homage to those fair originals, born, or rather 

 budded, so long to blush unseen, and waste their 

 sweetness on my father's heir. How delighted I was, 

 first to read, and then to have ocular proof, that 

 Boula de Nanteuil was a " standard of excellence " 

 (mine was only a half-standard, but let that pass) ; that 

 Kean was " always beautiful, in size first-rate, and in 

 shape perfection ; that Coupe d'Hebe was " the gem of 

 the family," and there, sure enough, I found her, a 

 cup for the gods, and jewelled with dew-drops ; and 

 how disappointed I felt as I read that Madam Laffay 

 "ought to be in every garden," but could not find her 

 in mine, soon consoling myself, however, in the 

 presence of Baronne Prevost and Duchess of Suther- 

 land, and, on the whole, as well pleased with my new 

 friends as was the author of my book when, one 

 morning in June, looking over the first bed of 

 roses he had ever raised from seed, he saw growing 

 with great vigour one of the very very few good roses 

 then originated in England, and subsequently called, 

 perhaps because robust in habit as poor Brummel's 

 "fat friend," Rivera's George the Fourth. 



If this account of my resuscitation if the sudden- 

 ness with which I cracked the cocoon of my grubship 

 and came out a rose-loving butterfly appear to any 

 of my hearers to be too severe a test of their implicit 

 confidence in the narrator (in coarser English, " a 



