of adversity, had lost its zest, and I was thinking whether time was to be better fought off by a plunge to the bottom of the Thames, or by the muzzle of one of Manton’s hair-triggers—­I was saved by a plunge into the King’s Bench.  There life was new, friendship was undisguised, my coat was not an object of scorn, my exploits were fashion, my duns were inadmissible, and my very captors were turned into my humble servants.  There, too, my nature, always social, had its full indulgence; for there I found, rather to my surprise, nine-tenths of my most accomplished acquaintance.  But the enemy still made his way; and I had learned to yawn, in spite of billiards and ball-playing, when the Act let me loose into the great world again.  Good-luck, too, had prepared a surprise for my debut.  I had scarcely exhibited myself in the streets, when I discovered that every man of my set was grown utterly blind whenever I happened to walk on the same side of the way, and that I might as well have been buried a century.  I was absurd enough to be indignant; for nothing can be more childish than any delicacy when a man cannot bet on the rubber.  But one morning a knock came to my attic-door which startled me by its professional vigour.  An attorney entered.  I had now nothing to fear, for the man whom no one will trust cannot well be in debt; and for once I faced an attorney without a palpitation.  His intelligence was flattering.  An old uncle of mine, who had worn out all that was human about him in amassing fifty thousand pounds, and finally died of starving himself, had expired with the pen in his hand, in the very act of leaving his thousands to pay the national debt.  But fate, propitious to me, had dried up his ink-bottle; the expense of replenishing it would have broken his heart of itself; and the attorney’s announcement to me was, that the will, after blinding the solicitor to the treasury and three of his clerks, was pronounced to be altogether illegible.

The fact that I was the nearest of kin got into the newspapers; and in my first drive down St. James’s, I had the pleasure of discovering that I had cured a vast number of my friends of their calamitous defect of vision.  But if the “post equitem sedet atra cura” was the maxim in the days of Augustus, the man who drives the slower cabriolet in the days of George the Fourth, cannot expect to escape.  The “hour too many” overtook me in the first week.  On one memorable evening I saw it coming, just as I turned the corner of Piccadilly; fair flight was hopeless, and I took refuge in that snug asylum on the right hand of St. James’s Street, which has since expanded into a palace.  I stoutly battled the foe, for I “took no note of time” during the next day and night; and when at last I walked forth into the air, I found that I had relieved myself of the burden of three-fourths of my reversion.  A weak mind on such an occasion would have cursed the cards, and talked of taking care