dal? Not she. All the while she was measuring the peer's predilection at so many yards of velvet-at the unity of a cashmere shawl, by the weight of diamonds of so many carats! Honest rascality's worth a plum of humbug, I say again. And all the while she was dressing a couple of hundred a-year beyond her pin-money, d' ye think the husband was blind? Not so. His mind was as mercenary as her own-his maxim that of the knight in Hudibras

"For what in worth is anything,

But so much money as 'twill bring?"

The time came when to be deaf and dumb any longer would have shown that his brain

"Outweighed his rage but half a grain."

Then he made a market of my Lord, and, in peaceful compromise, finds his indemnity-money in a snug place. And yet

'A wight he is, whose very sight would
Entitle him 'mirror of knighthood;'
That never bow'd his stubborn knee
To anything but chivalry :'

of a truth, an honourable man in the eyes of those fashion-mongers who bask only in the sun's blaze, and who mortally eschew a varlet who can't give you a good dinner, and who's name's not in the 'Court Gazette.""

"Ah," said I, musingly, recollecting some old words of Drayton's,

'How necessary it is now-a-days,

That each body live uprightly in all manner of ways!

For let never so little a gap be open,

And be sure of this, the worst will be spoken.'

"That's the very circumstance I complain of," retorted Leatherlungs, with a sort of serio-comic bitterness. "Here goes your moral prostitute, with the cloak of wealth and fashion about her, three times to church on a Sunday; and no flaw is found in her condition. True, in the first flush of womanhood, with woman's first love in her heart for one of poor merit's honest children, she has bartered away her birth-right for a mess of porridge-her freedom and youth and good looks, for an old man's love and law-licence, for his money-bags and monotony, for state and station, in short. So that she may spend her mornings in shopping and her evenings in being adulated, she has bargained to lie o'nights by the side of that next to nothing of a man as Coleridge_says-the lean and slippered pantaloon' who calls her his own. I ask you if this minion of prosperity be of more worth in creation's eye than the poor jaded things her carriage-wheels often splash, as they roll towards Storr and Mortimer's, or the opera? These last at least have necessity's stern law for their excuse; an apology, though not allowed below, that may be registered above. For my part, I hold them as perfectly alike as two sticks. They both wear paint and patches: the one in her mind to cover its deformity, the other upon her countenance to conceal its care."

"You are a second Solomon come to judgment, friend Leatherlungs," I observed, "and as nice a judge of the freaks of May Fair as of the lot for the Derby."

"I despise cant, that's all," replied the Leg; "and I see through it. The London world is one huge reservoir of hypocrisy. If only

governments could pass a tax upon treacherous seeming, and get honest men as collectors, there'd be no need of an income-tax, or a corn-law, or any other impost whatsoever. Humbug would cover all expenses by land and by sea; and we should return to the state mentioned in the song my old father used to sing me, only to save taxation : "Good hospitality

Was cherished then of many;

Now poor men starve and die,
And are not helped of any;
For charity waxeth cold,

And love is found in few:
This was not in time of old,
When this old cap was new.
'Then bribery was unborn;

No simony men did use;
Christians did usury scorn,
Devised among the Jews;
The lawyers to be feed

At that time hardly knew;
For man with man agreed,

When this old cap was new.'

Begging your pardon for my strictures, I can't but say I despise that gentleman you were just now talking to, considerably more than myself. Last year he made a point of toadying his friend of highest rank to the top of his bent; this year he abuses him, because he makes, or hopes to make, a better market of his brother's greater wealth and influence. As they bear a mortal hatred to each other, he cannot keep well with both. He gets twice as many hunters and twice as many dinners from the one that he did from the other, and he pays for the same in doses of ingratitude towards his former patron." "You have ridicule if not reason on your side," I replied, while he was taking breath. "And certainly there is a vast quantum of concealed leggism in the world. Our London season brings its fruit to perfection. We see proofs of its success in the boxes of the opera, as well as in the odds of the betting-book. Matrimonially-bent mothers bring their daughters to the annual fair of London, as slave-owners expose their cargoes in the market-place at Constantinople. In both cases the beauties and accomplishments of the girls are the dice wherewith the owners speculate, to throw for place and power, for pelf or plunder, for worldly consideration, or to shake off incumbrances from the family tree. Some find the motive solely in the gambler's love of speculation some, to while away the tedium of ennui. Some, without scions, speculate on whist, écarté, and the like; and play their game pretty sharply, too. Then there are the men about Town.' These speculate on everything and everybody. They are tufthunters, place-hunters, connection-hunters, dinner-hunters, scandalhunters, even Opera-ticket-hunters. There's neither man nor woman in the season who doesn't prey upon his or her kind in one way or another. Even as savage life precedes civilized society, and as civilization precedes refinement, so may be classed the different degrees of cannibalism. In the positive degree, man eats the raw material of his brother man; in the comparative (the feudal state of cannibalism), he only eats and drinks the thews and sinews, that is, the animal power and produce of his fellow-creature; while, in the superlative degree, under the specious shelter of refinement, legal cannibalism lays

gins and snares for body and soul, for everything that is, or was, or is to be, from the hands or brains of the labourer; only refinement puts the name of virtues upon vices, in order to run the greater riot of luxury."

Quoth Leatherlungs, "Your diatribe is as severe as my own; and as true. Go down a step or two in rank, and you'll find it almost as bad. You see in the journals all the queer contrivances by which paupers obtain money on false pretences. A gang of 'em, t'other day, by means of a surreptitious order, got out of a draper's shop ever so many pounds'-worth of silks and satin. The men were taken up before the magistrate, and got committed-their desert. I was thinking of the circumstance as I lounged over the counter of a haberdasher's, to whom a friend of mine is chief clerk. A fine customer comes in out of an emblazoned coach: the master attends, himself. Some fine tissues of silk were displayed, and one was chosen and paid for, and the young gay lady departed. That customer,' quoth my friend aside to me, chose the cheapest of the fabrics, and paid the price of the highest. Our governor is no green-'un, and knows when to lay on thickly. He doesn't make above a hundred per cent. upon that bargain!' This, too, was obtaining money on false pretences, only it was not an actionable mode, you know, because another name could be found for it. It was all in the way of trade, that theft." "Why," said I, smiling at my stable-philosopher's earnestness, "in the case of a lady in a linen-shop

'Doubtless the pleasure is as great

Of being cheated as to cheat:
As lookers-on feel most delight,

That least perceive a juggler's sleight.'

"the

"After all," said my companion, after a long pause, in which I was meditating my retreat from his discursive vein of remark, hypocrisies of the present day have only changed their current. Anciently cant was absorbed by the monks, as I've heard. Now it runs through every channel and gutter of life. I doubt whether patricians have as fine a time of it now, preaching up the Poor Law, as the jolly fathers of old had in furthering faith and fasting, while they built palaces as refectories and organized colonies of cooks."

"You may well make it a matter of doubt," said I, interested in the turn our conversation had taken; "that prince of epicures, who lived long enough to be fed with pap like a child, if I remember aright, gives a glorious description of the kitchen of a convent in Portugal. One, indeed, worthy the Vathek who surveyed it in 1794.' Through the centre of the immense and nobly-groined hall, not less than sixty feet in diameter, ran a brisk rivulet of the clearest water, containing every sort and size of the finest river fish. On one side loads of game and venison were heaped up; on the other, vegetables and fruits in endless variety. Beyond a long line of stoves, extended a row of ovens; and close to them hillocks of wheaten flour, whiter than snow, rocks of sugar, jars of the purest oil, and pastry in vast abundance, which a numerous tribe of lay-brothers and their attendants were rolling out, and puffing up into a hundred different shapes, singing all the while as blithely as larks in a corn-field.' It were a matter of pardonable curiosity to inquire whether the royal kitchens were purveyed in as regal or Roman a spirit."

"Well, that's not more stylish than one of us is doing it in the present day," exclaimed the Leg, with a look of considerable exultation. "There's, who began life without a morsel of brass in the world (except what he had in his face), now hasn't a pot, or pan, or poker, a gridiron, a kettle, or a coal-scuttle in his kitchen that is not solid silver; and his parlours are as full of vertu (I didn't say, virtue) as paradise. Your friend Nimrod forgot, or didn't know that, to put it in his "Quarterly Review" slash at legging. And he overlooked the fact, that one of the gentlemen he did show up had not only as many horses as Xerxes, but as many wives as Blue Beard. Well, certainly, our Bob did go the entire animal, the total pig-he did. And why not; so long as he could afford it, or those that trusted him could? There's who straps in his father's stable, and overlooks the exercise lads; he gives fifty shillings a pound for his cigars, and smokes twenty between breakfast and dinner every day he rises out of his bed. They do say he blows two at a time, one at one side of his mouth and another at the other; but I can't answer for that. But this I can vouch for, that I have drunk port wine with luncheon at a jockey's, for which he paid eight and twenty shillings a bottle; and that wasn't so worser, considering !"

These loose items of speech are to be understood as having been perpetrated as I made my way towards Tattersall's, by the quietest path I could find, seeing that Leatherlungs walk'd at me, so to describe our passage from the park towards Grosvenor-square. To say he went with me would be correct: to say he walk'd with me might do him mischief; for, although as scarlet a sample of impudence as ever blossomed in the "Ring," he does refrain from linking arms with his grace of B- or my lord of C-, which really, under all the circumstances, is no trifling instance of forbearance. You see him bandying news and jokes, and peradventure something more, with them, in all the familiarity of fellows well met; but should he encounter them where people unconnected with sporting do congregate, he "hangs on" while they discourse him, in a manner that has no parallel. If you can imagine a modest crab of the middle classes dancing attendance on an aristocrat of the testacous order, it will give some notion of it. Thus, at an angle of forty-five as it were, he bore me company to the corner of Grosvenor-place, and, as they say in the Footpads, "took close order" as we descended that Avernian declivity, the lane of odour, which conducts to Tattersall's. Being high season thereat, of course the market was well stocked. It was, as we have seen, the seventh day; and yet, probably, there wasn't a man in the whole assembly who went there for a purpose he would have volunteered to admit. Suppose the area at Tattersall's suddenly transformed into the palace of truth, some Sunday afternoon in the season! Wouldn't your first impulse be to inquire, "What had become of all the earthquakes?" That's the owner of Lazy-cum-tithes: he has sent his glandered colt for peremptory sale, because the "vet" only engages his nose shall keep tight for forty-eight hours. That cabinet minister comes to lay against his Derby horse that broke down in his morning's trial. The Duke of Star and Garter does you the favour to say, he can lay against the favourite for the "Two Thousand"-his owner has just informed him his horse shall be kept for Ascot. Such is Tatt's.

"Talk of horses and hounds, and of system of kennel!

Give me Leicestershire nags, and the hounds of Old Meynell."

There are two portraits of Mr. Meynell extant, one painted when he was a young man, by no less an artist than Sir Joshua Reynolds; the other, taken in his latter days, by Mr. Meynell's friend, the late Mr. Loraine Smith, of Enderby Hall in Leicestershire. Both these portraits are published. The first is drawn on stone by M. Gauci, and given in Colonel Cook's "Observations on Fox Hunting and the Management of Hounds :" the latter makes an admirable frontispiece to Mr. Delmè Radcliffe's volume, called "The Noble Science," and is a beautifully executed line-engraving by T. W. Archer. The portraits are as dissimilar as two pictures of the same man can possibly be. Colonel Cook's "young man" likeness is a kit-cat, representing a smart young fellow, with powder and pig-tail, dressed in the height of the then fashion, single-breasted, large-buttoned, white coat, lined with some dark colour, richly-laced waistcoat, and lace frilled shirt. The features are full, but this picture contains the model of what age would work into the likeness given by Mr. Delmè Radcliffe.

Mr. Radcliffe's is the picture for a sportsman's money, and I do not hesitate to say, that such a portrait of such a man is fairly worth the price of the volume. It is a delightful picture, for it is just the sort of man that sportsmen of the present day would picture Mr. Meynell to have been. In addition to this, it is a sporting picture-everything about it is sporting. The old gentleman is seated in his arm-chair, booted and spurred as he has come in from hunting, with his cap on the little round table (for hunting caps seem to have been worn then, 1794) and his huntsman, Jack Raven, appears at the door, accompanied by a hound called Glider. Against the wall of the room, which seems to be the master's "sanctum," is a picture of a horse. Mr. Meynell is here the venerable, white-headed, old man; he looks seventy, at least. He is bald, and his hair is swept to a point at the back of the head, but not made into a pigtail. His features are very fine, and there is a speaking expression in the picture. One can almost fancy what he is saying. The huntsman, Jack Raven, too, is good. Though they are dressed nearly alike, there is no mistaking which is the gentleman and which is the servant. Jack is an honest, bluff-looking, rather pot-bellied fellow,

C