chimerical and vain, but ever sweet and consoling, that in some generation afar awaits the Reader destined at last to do him justice. With thee, the Author is, of all men, he to whom old age comes the soonest. How quickly thou hastenest to say, "Not what he was! Vigor is waning—invention is flagging—past is his day—push him aside, and make room for the Fresh and the New." But the Author never admits that old age can fall on the Reader. The Reader to him is a being in whom youth is renewed through all cycles Leaning on his crutch, the Author still walks by the side of that friendly Shadow as he walked on summer eves, with a school-friend of boyhood—talking of the future with artless, hopeful lips! Dreams he that a day may come when he will have no Reader? O school-boy! dost thou ever dream that a day may come when thou wilt have no friend?
CHAPTER II.
Five years have passed away since this History opened. It is the month of June, once more—June, which clothes our London in all its glory; fills its languid ball-rooms with living flowers, and its stony causeways with human butterflies. It is about the hour of 6 p. m. The lounge in Hyde Park is crowded; along the road that skirts the Serpentine crawl the carriages one after the other; congregate, by the rails, the lazy lookerson—lazy in attitude, but with active eyes, and tongues sharpened on the whetstone of scandal; the scaligers of Club windows airing their vocabulary in the Park. Slowly saunter on footidlers of all degrees in the hierarchy of London idlesse; dandies of established fame—youthful tyros in their first season. Yonder, in the Ride, forms less inanimate seem condemned to active exercise; young ladies doing penance in a canter; old beaux at hard labor in a trot. Sometimes, by a more thoughtful brow, a still brisker pace, you recognize a busy member of the Imperial Parliament, who, advised by physicians to be as much on horseback as possible, snatches an hour or so in the interval between the close of his Committee and the interest of the Debate, and shirks the opening speech of a well known bore. Among such truant lawgivers (grief it is to say it) may
