ld antediluvian chateau, sir,
boxed up among beeches and rooks. Sir, only think of the small Squires
with the red faces, sir, and the grand white waistcoats down to their
hips--and the dames, sir, with their wigs, and their simpers, and their
visible pockets--and the damsels, blushing things in white muslin, with
sky-blue sashes and ribbons, and mufflers and things--and the sons, sir,
the promising young gentlemen, sir--and the doctor, and the lawyer--and
the parson. So you disapprove of Brighton, Mr. Tickler?

_Tickler_.--Brighthelmstone, when I knew it, was a pleasant fishing
village--what like it is now, I know not; but what I detest in the great
folks of your time, is, that insane selfishness which makes them prefer
any place, however abominable, where they can herd together in their
little exquisite coteries, to the noblest mansions surrounded with the
noblest domains, where they cannot exist without being more or less
exposed to the company of people not exactly belonging to their own
particular sect. How can society hang together long in a country where
the Corinthian capital takes so much pains to unrift itself from the
pillar? Now-a-day, sir, your great lord, commonly speaking, spends but a
month or six weeks in his ancestral abode; and even when he is there, he
surrounds himself studiously with a cursed town-crew, a pack of St.
James's Street fops, and Mayfair chatterers and intriguers, who give
themselves airs enough to turn the stomachs of the plain squirearchy and
their womankind, and render a visit to the castle a perfect nuisance.

_Theodore (aside to Mullion.)_--A prejudiced old prig!

_Tickler_.--They seem to spare no pains to show that they consider the
country as valuable merely for rent and game--the duties of the
magistracy are a bore--county meetings are a bore--a farce, I believe,
was the word--the assizes are a cursed bore--fox-hunting itself is a
bore, unless in Leicestershire, where the noble sportsmen, from all the
winds of heaven cluster together, and think with ineffable contempt of
the old-fashioned chase, in which the great man mingled with gentle and
simple, and all comers--sporting is a bore, unless in a regular
_battue_, when a dozen lordlings murder pheasants by the thousand,
without hearing the cock of one impatrician fowling-piece--except indeed
some dandy poet, or philosopher, or punster, has been admitted to make
sport to the Philistines. In short, every thing is a bore that bring