whose characters are above scandal.  Bond-street belongs to dandies and picture-buyers.  St. James’s to club-loungers, and young men in the Guards, with mustachios properly blackened by the cire of Mr. Delcroix; but thou, Oxford-street, what class can especially claim thee as its own?  Thou mockest at oligarchies; thou knowest nothing of select orders!  Thou art liberal as air—­a chartered libertine! accepting the homage of all, and retaining the stamp of none.  And to call thee stony-hearted!—­certainly thou art so to beggars—­to people who have not the WHEREWITHAL; but thou wouldst not be so respectable if thou wert not capable of a certain reserve to paupers.  Thou art civil enough, in all conscience, to those who have a shilling in their pocket;—­those who have not, why do they live at all?”

“That’s not exactly what surprises me,” said Asmodeus; “I don’t wonder why they live, but where they live:  for I perceive boards in every parish proclaiming that no vagrant—­that is, no person who is too poor to pay for his lodging—­will be permitted to stay there.  Where then does he stay?—­every parish unites against him—­not a spot of ground is lawful for him to stand on.  At length he is passed on to his own parish; the meaning of which is, that not finding a decent livelihood in one place, the laws prevent his seeking it at any other.  By the way, it would not be a bad plan to substitute a vagrant for a fox, and, to hunt him regularly, you might hunt him with a pack of respectable persons belonging to the middle class, and eat him when he’s caught.  That would be the shortest way to get rid of the race.  You might proclaim a reward for every vagrant’s head:  it would gain the King more honour with the rate-payers than clearing the country of wolves won to his predecessor.  What wolf eats so much as a beggar?  What wolf so troublesome, so famished, and so good for nothing?  People are quite right in judging a man’s virtue by his wealth; for when a man has not a shilling he soon grows a rogue.  He must live on his wits, and a man’s wits have no conscience when his stomach is empty.  We are all very poor in Hell—­very; if we were rich, Satan says, justly, that we should become idle.”

I know not how it is, but my frame is one peculiarly susceptible to ennui.  There’s no man so instantaneously bored.  What activity does this singular constitution in all cases produce!  All who are sensitive to ennui do eight times the work of a sleek, contented man.  Anything but a large chair by the fireside, and a family circle!  Oh! the bore of going every day over the same exhausted subjects, to the same dull persons of respectability; yet that is the doom of all domesticity.  Then pleasure!  A wretched play—­a hot opera, under the ghostly fathership of Mr. Monck Mason—­a dinner of sixteen, with such silence or such conversation!—­a water-party to Richmond, to catch cold and drink bad sauterne—­a flirtation, which fills all your friends with alarm,