ooms after a storm of rain, as soon as the political horizon
was clear. We have Congreve, who affected to be the Beau as well as the
Wit; Lord Hervey, more of the courtier than the Beau--a Wit by
inheritance--a peer, assisted into a pre-eminent position by royal
preference, and consequent _prestige_; and all these men were the
offspring of the particular state of the times in which they figured: at
earlier periods, they would have been deemed effeminate; in later ones,
absurd.

Then the scene shifts: intellect had marched forward gigantically: the
world is grown exacting, disputatious, critical, and such men as Horace
Walpole and Brinsley Sheridan appear; the characteristics of wit which
adorned that age being well diluted by the feebler talents of Selwyn and
Hook.

Of these, and others, '_table traits_,' and other traits, are here
given: brief chronicles of _their_ life's stage, over which a curtain
has so long been dropped, are supplied carefully from well established
sources: it is with characters, not with literary history, that we deal;
and do our best to make the portraitures life-like, and to bring forward
old memories, which, without the stamp of antiquity, might be suffered
to pass into obscurity.

Your Wit and your Beau, be he French or English, is no mediaeval
personage: the aristocracy of the present day rank among his immediate
descendants: he is a creature of a modern and an artificial age; and
with his career are mingled many features of civilized life, manners,
habits, and traces of family history which are still, it is believed,
interesting to the majority of English readers, as they have long been
to

GRACE and PHILIP WHARTON

_October, 1860_.

* * * * *

THE WITS AND BEAUX OF SOCIETY.

* * * * *

GEORGE VILLIERS, SECOND DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM.

Signs of the Restoration.--Samuel Pepys in his Glory.--A Royal
Company.--Pepys 'ready to Weep.'--The Playmate of Charles
II.--George Villiers's Inheritance.--Two Gallant Young
Noblemen.--The Brave Francis Villiers.--After the Battle of
Worcester.--Disguising the King.--Villiers in Hiding.--He
appears as a Mountebank.--Buckingham's Habits.--A Daring
Adventure.--Cromwell's Saintly Daughter.--Villiers and the
Rabbi.--The Buckingham Pictures and Estates.--York
House.--Villiers returns to England.--Poor Mary