of their fruits; dilettanti breakfasts, with a bronze Hercules standing among the bread and butter, or a reposing cast of Venus, fresh from Pompeii, as black and nude as a negress disporting on the banks of the Senegal, but dear and delicate to the eyes of taste; Sunday mornings at Tattersal’s, jockeying till the churches let out their population, and the time for visits was come; and Sunday evening routs at the duchess’s, with a cotillon by the vraies danseuses of the opera, followed by a concert, a round game, and a select supper for the initiated;—­the whole failed.  I had always an hour too much—­sixty mortal minutes, and every one of them an hour in itself, that I could never squeeze down.

  “Ye gods, annihilate both space and time,
  And make two lovers happy,”

may have been called a not over-modest request; but I can vouch for at least one half of it being the daily prayer of some thousands of the best-dressed people that the sun ever summoned to a day of twenty-four hours long.  On feeling the symptoms of this horary visitation, I regularly rushed into the streets, on the principle that some alleviation of misery is always to be found in fellow-suffering.  This maxim I invariably found false, like every other piece of the boasted wisdom of mankind.  I found the suffering infinitely increased by the association with my fellow-fashionables.  A man might as well have fled from his chamber to enjoy comfort in the wards of an hospital.  In one of my marches up and down the pave of St. James’s Street, that treadmill of gentlemen convicted in the penalty of having nothing to do, I lounged into the little hotel of the Guards, that stands beside the great hotel of the gamblers, like a babe under its mamma’s wing—­the likeness admirable, though the scale diminutive.  That “hour too many,” cost me three games of billiards, my bachelor’s house, and one thousand pounds.  This price of sixty minutes startled me a little; and, for a week, I meditated with some seriousness on the superior gaiety of a life spent in paving the streets, driving a wagon, or answering the knocker of a door.  But the “hour” again overflowed me.  I was walking it off in Regent Street, when an old fellow-victim met me, and prescribed a trot to Newmarket.  The prescription was taken, and the hour was certainly got rid of.  But the remedy was costly; for my betting-book left me minus ten thousand pounds.  I returned to town like a patient from a watering-place; relieved of every thing but the disease that took me there.  My last shilling remained among the noble blacklegs; but nothing could rob me of a fragment of my superfluous time, and I brought even a tenfold allowance of it back.  But every disease has a crisis; and when a lounge through the streets became at once useless and inconvenient—­when the novelty of being cut by all my noble friends, and of being seduously followed by that generation who, unlike the fickle world, reserve their tipstaff attentions for the day