with Prince George. Sir Robert used to answer everybody's inquiries with assurances that little Bobby was better, and Prince George quite out of danger."

Such was Cecilia's definition of the amiable couple who so manifestly despised me; and last night, at the Dunbars', they fully justified her diatribe. When they entered the room, the Duke of Merioneth happened to sit next me on the sofa, conversing in that familiar whisper by which he thinks proper to mark to the world that he knows only those whom he knows intimately. The whisperee of a duke became, of course, a fine thing in the eyes of such people as the Mardynvilles. In the course of ten minutes, up came Lady Dunbar, all smiles,-Lady Mardynville, all courtesies,— determined to make my acquaintance.

"Long desirous of the honour-moving in the same circle-meeting, night after night, without the privilege of speaking; so excessively awkward," &c. &c.

The duke rose, and stalked away to make room for my new friends; while Mr. Penrhyn shocked Sir Robert to death by pretending to mistake his household button for that of the R. Y. C.!

This morning arrived cards, and (without waiting to have them returned) an invitation for a dinner-party, three weeks hence.-Sha'n't go! What, but politics, can have been typified in the golden pippin of Ate? and what ages of discord has not the fatal fruit engendered! Yet, surely, the factions of Guelf and Ghibelline, or White and Red Rose, never carried their barbarian animosities to so unchristian a pitch, as the polite hatred of modern Whig and Tory. Since the triumph of the Catholic Question, political spleen has become a species of endemic at the west end; a cholera morbus never to be extirpated. It is considered a mark of caste among the fine ladies to "dote on the Duke of Wellington," or to "adore the present ministry;" the intellectual coteries affecting the latter creed, the exclusives, the former. The Ventilator, its eems, set their brains a-madding for a season or so; and, just as they all went hero-mad during the peninsular war, they became statesman-mad when the star of Canning, Brougham, or Stanley, raged as the dogstar of the hour.

And then they so dearly love a little bit of finesse, to sneak their pitiful way to a vote, either at Brookes's or in the house. Madame Ln was the first to bring

i

this sort of tripotage into fashion. So well-bred, so well-dressed, nothing she did appeared amiss; like Cleo

patra,

"Vilest things

Became themselves in her, and holy bishops

Blessed her when"

From her

she advocated the cause of holy alliance. more than one flighty dame derives a precedent for a system of intrigue, such as the Duchesse de Longueville might rise from her grave to applaud.

After all, the most able of female politicians makes herself as disagreeable as ridiculous. Women carry their sensibilities with them even into the Ventilator, and exercise their feelings when they fancy they are exercising their judgment. They see through the eyes of their heart, and hear with its ears; and sometimes, unluckily, talk out of its abundance. Yesterday, at dinner at the Delavals', a gradually rising murmur reached us from the end of the table farthest from the place where I was quietly eating my soup, which at length deepened into a decided storm. Mrs. Percy and the old Dutchess of Plymouth were speaking what they call their minds, in the plainest English ever uttered by lips polite; each reviling the particular friends or particular party of the other. Lady Cecilia, who hates to have the pleasantness of her parties broken in upon, kept trying to pour oil upon the waves; but her oil was mere huile de roses, of too light a quality to subdue billows so uproarious; and Penrhyn, a dear lover of mischief, kept spurring the belligerants on to battle by little minikin-pin pricks of impertinence.

Now, of what use was all their squabbling, either to their party (their party!) or themselves? Not a word uttered by either, for arguments they did not attempt to utter, would have weighed against an eider duck's feather! On one side it was always "It is well known that, if the duke thought proper, he might"-so and so; on the other, "Nothing but the paltry intrigues and the underhand cabals of the tories have prevented"—so and so. What a drawback upon rational conversation and social feeling! Better talk to all eternity of the weather, as we used to do in Ireland; or of chiffons, as I am told they do in Paris. Lady Cecilia declares that three or four of the best houses in town have become insupportable during the last few years, on account of

the state of parties; among others, that of her charming sister, the marchioness; where,

"Under which club, Bezonian? Speak or die!"

is the first inquiry made of every new pretender to her acquaintance.

George Hanton, who sat next me yesterday during this battle of frogs and mice, could not conceal his indignation that the process of so good a dinner (when he happened to be in good appetite) should be disturbed by such impertinent bickering!

"What bores those women are!" he whispered to me, with a face of the deepest concern; "I protest I hardly know what I have got on my plate!" and, with Hanton, such ignorance is any thing but bliss. I remember him, ten years ago, coming to pass the holydays at Lord Randall's, in Staffordshire, when Armine and I were young and disengaged; and then, as now, having eyes only for an entrée. His time and fortune are spent in ministering to his palate; and a firstrate education seems to have instructed him in nothing but the gormandizings of mankind. He recognises the Spartans only by their black broth, and the Romans by the gluttonies of Apicius or Lucullus. Talk to him of the state of the arts during the middle ages, and he will answer that, in those times, forest venison was a most delicious thing; and, in the way of chronology, instead of dating from "before the invention of gunpowder," or "the discovery of printing," George is apt to time his epochs by "before tea was brought into Europe," "before potatoes were in general use." 99 His acquaintance, nay, his friends, are chosen selon the merits of their cook, or their power of appreciating the cooks of others. He was heard to exclaim of one of the greatest ministers of modern times, "I have a bad opinion of Lord I once saw what pretended to be a suprême de volaille at his table, which was literally made of veal."

or

"And what then-do you suppose he ordered such a substitute?"

"No!-but what an opinion must his cook have had of his understanding, to venture on such a subterfuge; and, after all, who knows one better than one's cook?" -Hanton has dropped the acquaintance of the Mardynvilles, because their turbot is high instead of their veni

son, and refused to be presented to pretty little Lady Ryland, on account of the badness of her dinners. "It is time lost," said he, "to know such people." He invariably places himself next me at dinner; and I have discovered that my ignorance of gastronomic science constitutes my attraction. I have not taste enough to secure the truffles, or the beaux morceaux of the madedishes brought round; and Mr. Hanton, as my next neighbour, profits by the oversight. I fear he will judge me unworthy of an invitation to one of his dinners, which I hear highly extolled by those, bien entendu, who hold

"That to live well means nothing but to eat."

May 1.-What a beautiful city, is London at this season of the year, when the spring breezes, dispersing both fog and smoke, afford glimpses of blue sky! What order in the streets;-what courtesy, what splendour in the shops !-Regent-street, for instance, with its macadamized road covered with carriages, and wide pavements thronged with passengers, is a very type of the times;-all show and speculation,-all activity and superficiality. Then the west end squares, and the streets leading into Park Lane,—how dignifiedly dull ;"nothing to be seen there," as some would-be Brummel observed, "but the aristocracy, savoir, a population of lords and footmen." Each isolated mansion of that favoured region contains, within its little world, all that ingenuity and industry tender in exchange for wealth; the best productions of art, the newest combinations of science, the most graceful inventions of fancy; to render life more easy and exquisite for those who know not a discomfiture beyond the rumpling of the rose-leaf!

Then, the two new quarters that arose under the reign of that king of the surfaces, George IV.!-the Regent's Park,-the Athens of the Bloomsburians; and Belgrave and Eaton Squares,-the Place Vendôme, and Place de Louis XV., of our new lords and old bankers. There live the opulent and the ascendant,-the Dunbars and the Mardynvilles. There dines Hanton,-there flirts Mrs. Percy; while my friend Lady Cecilia, more aristocratic in her predilections, clings to the sobrieties of Grosvenor Square; whose ancient hall-chairs are polished, not by French varnish, but by much friction of gen

erations of lackeys, from the time when the link of Lady Mary Wortley's chairman was thrust into the extinguisher, still suspended over the entrance!

Then we have Carlton Gardens,-the Hesperides of cabinet ministers,-which shifts its occupants with every change of administration. Were the ghosts of Fox and Sheridan to arise from the abbey in the mists of some November morning, how would they marvel to behold the classic ground of Carlton House devoted to the hubbub of conservative clubs, or the gorgeous vulgarity of such satraps as Sir Bungalore Hooghly and Co. !

Till within these fifteen years, however, the domestic architecture of London hobbled far behind the march. of luxury. A handsome town residence was then a show-house-bath-rooms, a gallery, and a little marble, and plate-glass, constituted a palace; and, lo! there are now squares-full of mansions fit for princes to be ruined in! Not an agent's book but contains a dozen attainable by the week or season, where you may live as Thelusson, or the Dutchess of Gordon, sovereignized some forty years ago.

The immediate consequence of this diffusion of brick and mortar seems to be the evacuation of the city. Instead of the wealthy merchants and great bankers once resident in the vast, square, roomy mansions of its dark and narrow lanes, I learn that not a merchant of eminence sleeps within sound of Bow Bell; and hence the difficulty of appropriately filling up those civic offices, formerly so eminent in their illustration. The commodious dwellings of the great capitalists have been converted into warehouses, or are inhabited by clerks; and the thinly populated city is twice as wholesome and half as dignified. The Regent's Park, meanwhile, extends its stuccoed terraces;- and London seems to stretch its gigantic arms and gape for air,like some mighty monster awaking from a trance.

It might afford me a useful lesson, that so many of my new visiters were, by-the-way, friends of my imprudent predecessors here, and fed on their undoing.

"Aha!" drawled little Mrs. Percy, on her first visit, "I see you have got the Thistledown's love of a house, the prettiest little toyshop in London.

"Foolish people! They would do things to which they had no pretension;-swam out of their depth, and sank for ever."