ded. I sat myself quietly down in one
corner of the room, and looked upon the motley groups around. I smiled
inly as they reminded me of the scenes my own anteroom, in my younger
days of folly and fortune, was wont to exhibit; the same heterogeneous
assemblage (only upon a grander scale) of the ministers to the physical
appetites and the mental tastes. There was the fretting and impudent
mountebank, side by side with the gentle and patient scholar; the
harlot's envoy and the priest's messenger; the agent of the police and
the licensed breaker of its laws; there--but what boots a more prolix
description? What is the anteroom of a great man, who has many wants
and many tastes, but a panorama of the blended disparities of this
compounded world?

While I was moralizing, a gentleman suddenly thrust his head out of a
door, and appeared to reconnoitre us. Instantly the crowd swept up to
him. I thought I might as well follow the general example, and pushing
aside some of my fellow-loiterers, I presented myself and my name to the
gentleman, with the most ingratiating air I could command.

The gentleman, who was tolerably civil for a great man's great man,
promised that my visit should be immediately announced to the Prince;
and then, with the politest bow imaginable, slapped the door in my face.
After I had waited about seven or eight minutes longer, the gentleman
reappeared, singled me from the crowd, and desired me to follow him; I
passed through another room, and was presently in the Regent's presence.

I was rather startled when I saw, by the morning light, and in
deshabille, the person of that royal martyr to dissipation. His
countenance was red, but bloated, and a weakness in his eyes added
considerably to the jaded and haggard expression of his features. A
proportion of stomach rather inclined to corpulency seemed to betray the
taste for the pleasures of the table, which the most radically coarse,
and yet (strange to say) the most generally accomplished and
really good-natured of royal profligates, combined with his other
qualifications. He was yawning very elaborately over a great heap of
papers when I entered. He finished his yawn (as if it were too brief
and too precious a recreation to lose), and then said, "Good morning,
Monsieur Devereux; I am glad that you have found me out _at last_."

"I was afraid, Monseigneur, of appearing an intruder on your presence,
by offering my homage to you before."

"So like my goo