ates of broken-down English gentlemen, with rupees
tortured out of bleeding rajahs, who smokes a hookah in public, and in
private carries about a guilty conscience, diamonds of untold value,
and a diseased liver; who has a vulgar wife, with a retinue of black
servants whom she maltreats, and a gentle son and daughter with good
impulses and an imperfect education, desirous to amend their own and
their parents' lives, and thoroughly ashamed of the follies of the old
people. If you go to the house of an Indian gentleman now, he does not
say, "Bring more curricles," like the famous Nabob of Stanstead Park.
He goes to Leadenhall Street in an omnibus, and walks back from the City
for exercise. I have known some who have had maid-servants to wait on
them at dinner. I have met scores who look as florid and rosy as any
British squire who has never left his paternal beef and acres. They do
not wear nankeen jackets in summer. Their livers are not out of order
any more; and as for hookahs, I dare swear there are not two now kept
alight within the bills of mortality; and that retired Indians would as
soon think of smoking them, as their wives would of burning themselves
on their husbands' bodies at the cemetery, Kensal Green, near to
the Tyburnian quarter of the city which the Indian world at present
inhabits. It used to be Baker Street and Harley Street; it used to be
Portland Place, and in more early days Bedford Square, where the Indian
magnates flourished; districts which have fallen from their pristine
state of splendour now, even as Agra, and Benares, and Lucknow, and
Tippoo Sultan's city are fallen.

After two-and-twenty years' absence from London, Mr. Binnie returned
to it on the top of the Gosport coach with a hatbox and a little
portmanteau, a pink fresh-shaven face, a perfect appetite, a suit of
clothes like everybody else's, and not the shadow of a black servant.
He called a cab at the White Horse Cellar, and drove to Nerot's Hotel,
Clifford Street; and he gave the cabman eightpence, making the fellow,
who grumbled, understand that Clifford Street was not two hundred yards
from Bond Street, and that he was paid at the rate of five shillings and
fourpence per mile--calculating the mile at only sixteen hundred yards.
He asked the waiter at what time Colonel Newcome had ordered dinner, and
finding there was an hour on his hands before the meal, walked out to
examine the neighbourhood for a lodging where he could live more qu