better
society than that of his merry phantasmata. We shall presently find in
what way this remarkable phenomenon influenced his future destiny.

"On the death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, we find him received into the family
of Mr. Willoughby, an eminent Turkey merchant, resident in Birchin Lane,
London. We lose a little while here the chain of his history,--by what
inducements this gentleman was determined to make him an inmate of his
house. Probably he had had some personal kindness for Mrs. Sittingbourn
formerly; but however it was, the young man was here treated more like a
son than a clerk, though he was nominally but the latter. Different
avocations, the change of scene, with that alternation of business and
recreation which in its greatest perfection is to be had only in London,
appear to have weaned him in a short time from the hypochondriacal
affections which had beset him at Charnwood.

"In the three years which followed his removal to Birchin Lane, we find
him making more than one voyage to the Levant, as chief factor for Mr.
Willoughby at the Porte. We could easily fill our biography with the
pleasant passages which we have heard him relate as having happened to
him at Constantinople, such as his having been taken up on suspicion of
a design of penetrating the seraglio, etc.; but, with the deepest
convincement of this gentleman's own veracity, we think that some of the
stories are of that whimsical, and others of that romantic nature,
which, however diverting, would be out of place in a narrative of this
kind, which aims not only at strict truth, but at avoiding the very
appearance of the contrary.

"We will now bring him over the seas again, and suppose him in the
counting-house in Birchin Lane, his protector satisfied with the returns
of his factorage, and all going on so smoothly that we may expect to
find Mr. Liston at last an opulent merchant upon 'Change, as it is
called. But see the turns of destiny! Upon a summer's excursion into
Norfolk, in the year 1801, the accidental sight of pretty Sally Parker,
as she was called, (then in the Norwich company,) diverted his
inclinations at once from commerce; and he became, in the language of
commonplace biography, stage-struck. Happy for the lovers of mirth was
it that our hero took this turn; he might else have been to this hour
that unentertaining character, a plodding London merchant.

"We accordingly find him shortly after making his _debut_, as it is
called