on and Oxford, where they learned
to drink and swear and to call a main as well as to play tennis and
billiards and to write Latin, and were thrust into Brooks's before
they knew the difference in value between a farthing and a banknote: at
nineteen they were hardened rake, or accomplished men of the world, or
both. Dissipated noblemen of middle age like March and Sandwich, wits
and beaus and fine gentlemen like Selwyn and Chesterfield and Walpole,
were familiarly called by their first names by youngsters like Fox and
Carlisle and Comyn. Difference of age was no difference. Young Lord
Carlisle was the intimate of Mr. Selwyn, born thirty years before him.

And whilst I am speaking of intimacies, that short one which sprang
up between me and the renowned Charles Fox has always seemed the most
unaccountable: not on my part, for I fell a victim to him at once. Pen
and paper, brush and canvas, are wholly inadequate to describe the
charm of the man. When he desired to please, his conversation and the
expression of his face must have moved a temperament of stone itself.
None ever had more devoted friends or more ardent admirers. They saw his
faults, which he laid bare before them, but they settled his debts again
and again, vast sums which he lost at Newmarket and at Brooks's. And not
many years after the time of which I now write Lord Carlisle was paying
fifteen hundred a year on the sum he had loaned him, cheerfully denying
himself the pleasures of London as a consequence.

It was Mr. Fox who discovered for me my lodgings in Dover Street, vowing
that I could not be so out of fashion as to live at an inn. The brief
history of these rooms, as given by him, was this: "A young cub had
owned them, whose mamma had come up from Berkshire on Thursday, beat him
soundly on Friday, paid his debts on Saturday, and had taken him back
on Sunday to hunt with Sir Henry the rest of his life." Dorothy came one
day with her mother and swept through my apartments, commanded all the
furniture to be moved about, ordered me to get pictures for the walls,
and by one fell decree abolished all the ornaments before the landlady,
used as she was to the ways of quality, had time to gasp.

"Why, Richard," says my lady, "you will be wanting no end of pretty
things to take back to Maryland when you go. You shall come with me
to-morrow to Mr. Josiah Wedgwood's, to choose some of them."

"Dorothy!" says her mother, reprovingly.

"And he must have the Chi