‘Nay, my good fellow,’ was the answer to this peroration, ’travelling from the East? impossible!’

‘Why, my dear boy, why?’

‘Because the wise men came from the East,’

‘So, then, sa-ar—­you think me a fool?’

‘By no means; I know you to be one,’ quoth Sherry, and turned away.  It is due to both the parties to this anecdote to state that it is quite apocryphal, and rests on the slenderest authority.  However, whether fool or not, Brummell has one certain, though small, claim upon certain small readers.  Were you born in a modern generation, when scraps of poetry were forbidden in your nursery, and no other pabulum was offered to your infant stomach, but the rather dull biographies of rather dull, though very upright men?—­if so, I pity you.  Old airs of a jaunty jig-like kind are still haunting the echoes of my brain.  Among them is—­

  ’The butterfly was a gentleman,
  Which nobody can refute: 
  He left his lady-love at home,
  And roamed in a velvet suit.’

I remember often to have ruminated over this character of an innocent, and, I believe, calumniated, insect.  He was a gentleman, and the consequences thereof were twofold:  he abandoned the young woman who had trusted her affections to him, and attired his person in a complete costume of the best Lyons silk-velvet, not the proctor’s velvet, which Theodore felt with thumb and finger, impudently asking ’how much a yard?’ I secretly resolved to do the same thing as Mr. Butterfly when I came of age.  But the said Mr. Butterfly had a varied and somewhat awful history, all of which was narrated in various ditties chanted by my nurse.  I could not quite join in her vivid assertion that she would

  ’——­be a butterfly,
    Born in a bower,
  Christened in a tea-pot,
    And dead in an hour.’

Aetat four, life is dear, and the idea of that early demise was far from welcome to me.  I privily agreed that I would not be a butterfly.  But there was no end to the history of this very inconstant insect in our nursery lore.  We didn’t care a drop of honey for Dr. Watts’s ‘Busy Bee;’ we infinitely preferred the account—­not in the ’Morning Post’—­of the ‘Butterfly’s Ball’ and the ’Grasshopper’s Feast; and few, perhaps, have ever given children more pleasures of imagination than William Roscoe, its author.  There were some amongst us, however, who were already being weaned to a knowledge of life’s mysterious changes, and we sought the third volume of the romance of the flitting gaudy thing in a little poem called ‘The Butterfly’s Funeral.’