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OR,

THE ROMANCE OF A WEEK.

By Peter George Patmore.

EDITED BY THE

AUTHOR OF "TREMAINE," "DE VERE," &c.

i.. R. P. Ward.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

LONDON:

HENRY COLBURN, PUBLISHER,

GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.

1844.

LONDON:

HARRISON AND CO., PRINTERS,

ST. MARTIN'S LANE.

CHATSWORTH.

I.

CLOSE OF THE LONDON SEASON.

THE London season of 18- was scarcely over, though the wintry summer had worn itself painfully away into mid-autumn. A few more coming parties, casting their dull shadows before, still furnished excuses for those to bestow their inanity a little longer upon the town, who would otherwise have hastened to bestow it elsewhere; a few more budding flirtations were still to be mutually flattered into a fitting growth for the heated and perfumed atmosphere of a country conservatory to "force" them at once into the "bright consummate flower" of a declaration, or the bitter dead-sea fruit of a

VOL. I.

B

divorce; a few more conspiracies were yet to be completed, in vice of which a winter in Paris was to be "made glorious summer," by the entanglement of some booby heir in the double meshes of a manœuvring mother and a heartless beauty; a few more pigeons were to be plucked at Crocky's, to feather the travelling nests of the periodical migrators to the pastoral hells of the Rheingau ;-and, running their sweet course purely and brightly through all these-like a bright and pure stream through the foul streets of some pestilent city-a few more of those innocent and happy passions were to be warmed to that mutual interfusing of two young and pure hearts into one, which, even in the Great World that we are glancing at-nay,-which there more than anywhere else forms the only perfect and enduring bliss of which the life of that World is capable.

The matter-of-fact reader will be good enough to comprehend, from the foregoing,

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