al comes on. In the meantime, his majesty, who has lived in dignified
retirement since he came to the throne, has taken up his abode, with
rural felicity, in a cottage in Windsor Forest; where he now, contemning
all the pomp and follies of his youth, and this metropolis, passes his
days amidst his cabbages, like Dioclesian, with innocence and
tranquillity, far from the intrigues of courtiers, and insensible to the
murmuring waves of the fluctuating populace, that set in with so strong a
current towards "the mob-led queen," as the divine Shakespeare has so
beautifully expressed it.

You ask me about Vauxhall Gardens;--I have not seen them--they are no
longer in fashion--the theatres are quite vulgar--even the opera-house
has sunk into a second-rate place of resort. Almack's balls, the
Argyle-rooms, and the Philharmonic concerts, are the only public
entertainments frequented by people of fashion; and this high superiority
they owe entirely to the difficulty of gaining admission. London, as my
brother says, is too rich, and grown too luxurious, to have any exclusive
place of fashionable resort, where price alone is the obstacle. Hence,
the institution of these select aristocratic assemblies. The
Philharmonic concerts, however, are rather professional than fashionable
entertainments; but everybody is fond of music, and, therefore,
everybody, that can be called anybody, is anxious to get tickets to them;
and this anxiety has given them a degree of _eclat_, which I am persuaded
the performance would never have excited had the tickets been purchasable
at any price. The great thing here is, either to be somebody, or to be
patronised by a person that is a somebody; without this, though you were
as rich as Croesus, your golden chariots, like the comets of a season,
blazing and amazing, would speedily roll away into the obscurity from
which they came, and be remembered no more.

At first when we came here, and when the amount of our legacy was first
promulgated, we were in a terrible flutter. Andrew became a man of
fashion, with all the haste that tailors, and horses, and dinners, could
make him. My father, honest man, was equally inspired with lofty ideas,
and began a career that promised a liberal benefaction of good things to
the poor--and my mother was almost distracted with calculations about
laying out the money to the best advantage, and the sum she would allow
to be spent. I alone preserved my natural equanimity;