he activity of his libellers
by the conviction that their prolusions did not even amount to a
caricature, he was less easily satisfied with another performance which
speedily advanced its claims to public notice.

There is an unavoidable reaction in all human affairs. The Duke of
St. James had been so successfully attacked that it became worth while
successfully to defend him, and another Sunday paper appeared, the
object of which was to maintain the silver side of the shield. Here
everything was _couleur de rose_. One week the Duke saved a poor man
from the Serpentine; another a poor woman from starvation; now an orphan
was grateful; and now Miss Zouch, impelled by her necessity and his
reputation, addressed him a column and a half, quite heart-rending.
Parents with nine children; nine children without parents; clergymen
most improperly unbeneficed; officers most wickedly reduced; widows of
younger sons of quality sacrificed to the Colonies; sisters of literary
men sacrificed to national works, which required his patronage to
appear; daughters who had known better days, but somehow or other
had not been so well acquainted with their parents; all advanced with
multiplied petitions, and that hackneyed, heartless air of misery which
denotes the mumper. His Grace was infinitely annoyed, and scarcely
compensated for the inconvenience by the prettiest little creature in
the world, who one day forced herself into his presence to solicit the
honour of dedicating to him her poems.

He had enough on his hands, so he wrote her a cheque and, with a
courtesy which must have made Sappho quite desperate, put her out of the
room.

We forgot to say that the name of the new journal was 'The New World.'
The new world is not quite so big as the universe, but then it is as
large as all the other quarters of the globe together. The worst of this
business was, 'The Universe' protested that the Duke of St. James, like
a second Canning, had called this 'New World' into existence, which was
too bad, because, in truth, he deprecated its discovery scarcely less
than the Venetians.

Having thus managed, in the course of a few weeks, to achieve the
reputation of an unrivalled roue, our hero one night betook himself to
Almack's, a place where his visits, this season, were both shorter and
less frequent.

Many an anxious mother gazed upon him, as he passed, with an eye which
longed to pierce futurity; many an agitated maiden looked exquisitely