oll and glitter the
countless streams of indolent and voluptuous life; when the upper class
spend, and the middle class make; when the ball-room is the Market of
Beauty, and the club-house the School for Scandal; when the hells yawn
for their prey, and opera-singers and fiddlers--creatures hatched from
gold, as the dung-flies from the dung-swarm, and buzz, and fatten, round
the hide of the gentle Public In the cant phase, it was "the London
season." And happy, take it altogether, happy above the rest of the
year, even for the hapless, is that period of ferment and fever. It is
not the season for duns, and the debtor glides about with a less anxious
eye; and the weather is warm, and the vagrant sleeps, unfrozen, under
the starlit portico; and the beggar thrives, and the thief rejoices--for
the rankness of the civilisation has superfluities clutched by all. And
out of the general corruption things sordid and things miserable crawl
forth to bask in the common sunshine--things that perish when the first
autumn winds whistle along the melancholy city. It is the gay time
for the heir and the beauty, and the statesman and the lawyer, and the
mother with her young daughters, and the artist with his fresh pictures,
and the poet with his new book. It is the gay time, too, for the starved
journeyman, and the ragged outcast that with long stride and patient
eyes follows, for pence, the equestrian, who bids him go and be d---d in
vain. It is a gay time for the painted harlot in a crimson pelisse;
and a gay time for the old hag that loiters about the thresholds of the
gin-shop, to buy back, in a draught, the dreams of departed youth. It is
gay, in fine, as the fulness of a vast city is ever gay--for Vice as
for Innocence, for Poverty as for Wealth. And the wheels of every single
destiny wheel on the merrier, no matter whether they are bound to Heaven
or to Hell.

Arthur Beaufort, the young heir, was at his father's house. He was fresh
from Oxford, where he had already discovered that learning is not better
than house and land. Since the new prospects opened to him, Arthur
Beaufort was greatly changed. Naturally studious and prudent, had his
fortunes remained what they had been before his uncle's death, he would
probably have become a laborious and distinguished man. But though his
abilities were good, he had not those restless impulses which belong to
Genius--often not only its glory, but its curse. The Golden Rod cast
his energies a