Who knows?  They may have kept those very books at the library still—­at the well-remembered library on the Pantiles, where they sell that delightful, useful Tunbridge ware.  I will go and see.  I went my way to the Pantiles, the queer little old-world Pantiles, where, a hundred years since, so much good company came to take its pleasure.  Is it possible, that in the past century, gentlefolks of the first rank (as I read lately in a lecture on George II. in the Cornhill Magazine) assembled here and entertained each other with gaming, dancing, fiddling, and tea?  There are fiddlers, harpers, and trumpeters performing at this moment in a weak little old balcony, but where is the fine company?  Where are the earls, duchesses, bishops, and magnificent embroidered gamesters?  A half-dozen of children and their nurses are listening to the musicians; an old lady or two in a poke bonnet passes, and for the rest, I see but an uninteresting population of native tradesmen.  As for the library, its window is full of pictures of burly theologians, and their works, sermons, apologues, and so forth.  Can I go in and ask the young ladies at the counters for “Manfroni, or the One-Handed Monk,” and “Life in London, or the Adventures of Corinthian Tom, Jeremiah Hawthorn, Esq., and their friend Bob Logic?”—­absurd.  I turn away abashed from the casement—­from the Pantiles—­no longer Pantiles, but Parade.  I stroll over the Common and survey the beautiful purple hills around, twinkling with a thousand bright villas, which have sprung up over this charming ground since first I saw it.  What an admirable scene of peace and plenty!  What a delicious air breathes over the heath, blows the cloud shadows across it, and murmurs through the full-clad trees!  Can the world show a land fairer, richer, more cheerful?  I see a portion of it when I look up from the window at which I write.  But fair scene, green woods, bright terraces gleaming in sunshine, and purple clouds swollen with summer rain—­nay, the very pages over which my head bends—­disappear from before my eyes.  They are looking backwards, back into forty years off, into a dark room, into a little house hard by on the Common here, in the Bartlemy-tide holidays.  The parents have gone to town for two days:  the house is all his own, his own and a grim old maid-servant’s, and a little boy is seated at night in the lonely drawing-room, poring over “Manfroni, or the One-Handed Monk,” so frightened that he scarcely dares to turn round.

DE JUVENTUTE.

Our last paper of this veracious and roundabout series related to a period which can only be historical to a great number of readers of this Magazine.  Four I saw at the station to-day with orange-covered books in their hands, who can but have known George IV. by books, and statues, and pictures.  Elderly gentlemen were in their prime, old men in their middle age, when he reigned over us.  His image remains