perhaps--to resume your
old place and among your old associates; but where are they? and what
have they become? You left them young men about town, you find them now
among the "middle ages;" when you parted they were slim, lank, agile
fellows, that could spring into a saddle and fly their horse over a
five-bar rail, or pull an oar with any one. Now, they are of the portly
order, wear wider-skirted coats, trousers without straps, and cloth
boots; their hats, too, have widened in the leaf, so as to throw a more
liberal shade over broader cheeks; the whiskers are more bushy, and less
accurate in curl. If they ride, the horse has more bone and timber under
him; and when they bow to some fair face in a passing carriage there is
no brightening of the eye, but in its place a look of easier intimacy
than heretofore. These are not the men you left?--alas they are! A new
generation of young men about town has sprung up, who "know not Joseph,"
and with whom you have few, if any, sympathies.

So I find it myself. I left England at a time when pleasure was the mad
pursuit of every young fellow; and under that designation came every
species of extravagance and all kind of wild excess. Men of five
thousand a-year were spending twelve! Men of twelve, thirty! Every
season saw some half-dozen cross the Channel, "cleared out"--some, never
more to be heard of. Others, lingering in Paris or Brussels to confer
with their lawyer, who was busily engaged in compromising, contesting,
disputing, and bullying a host of creditors, whose very rogueries had
accomplished the catastrophe they grumbled at. Lords, living on ten
or twelve hundred pounds a-year were to be met with everywhere;
Countesses, lodged in every little town in Germany. The Dons of dragoon
regiments were seen a-foot in the most obscure of watering-places; and
men who had loomed large at Doncaster, and booked thousands, were
now fain to risk francs and florins among the flats of Brussels and
Aix-la-Chapelle. The pace was tremendous; few who came of age with
a good estate held out above two or three years. And if any listener
should take his place beside a group of fashionable-looking young
Englishmen in the Boulevard de Grand, or the Graben at Vienna, the
chances were greatly in favour of his hearing such broken phrases as,
"Caught it heavily!"--"All wrong at Ascot!"--"Scott's fault!"--"Cleared
out at Crocky's!"--"No standing two hundred per cent!"--"Infernal
scoundrel, Ford!"--"Tha