ual Power
amidst "the Varieties of Life;" and, in spite of bars to the door, and
policemen in the street, no one can be said to sleep in safety while
there wakes the eye of a single foe.

CHAPTER II.

The glory of Bond Street is no more. The title of Bond Street Lounger
has faded from our lips. In vain the crowd of equipages and the blaze of
shops: the renown of Bond Street was in its pavement, its pedestrians.
Art thou old enough, O reader! to remember the Bond Street Lounger and
his incomparable generation? For my part, I can just recall the decline
of the grand era. It was on its wane when, in the ambition of boyhood, I
first began to muse upon high neck cloths and Wellington boots. But the
ancient habitues--the magni nominis umbrae, contemporaries of Brummell
in his zenith, boon companions of George IV. in his regency--still
haunted the spot. From four to six in the hot month of June, they
sauntered stately to and fro, looking somewhat mournful even then,
foreboding the extinction of their race. The Bond Street Lounger was
rarely seen alone: he was a social animal, and walked arm in arm with
his fellow-man. He did not seem born for the cares of these ruder
times; not made was he for an age in which Finsbury returns members to
parliament. He loved his small talk; and never since then has talk been
so pleasingly small. Your true Bond Street Lounger had a very dissipated
look. His youth had been spent with heroes who loved their bottle.
He himself had perhaps supped with Sheridan. He was by nature a
spendthrift: you saw it in the roll of his walk. Men who make money
rarely saunter; men who save money rarely swagger. But saunter and
swagger both united to stamp PRODIGAL on the Bond Street Lounger. And so
familiar as he was with his own set, and so amusingly supercilious with
the vulgar residue of mortals whose faces were strange to Bond Street!
But he is gone. The world, though sadder for his loss, still strives to
do its best without him; and our young men, nowadays, attend to
model cottages, and incline to Tractarianism. Still the place, to
an unreflecting eye, has its brilliancy and bustle; but it is a
thoroughfare, not a lounge. And adown the thoroughfare, somewhat
before the hour when the throng is thickest, passed two gentlemen of an
appearance exceedingly out of keeping with the place.--Yet both had
the air of men pretending to aristocracy,--an old-world air of
respectability and stake in the country, and