son, as described by Mr. Pope in his ’Iliad’); it was through Mr. Reynolds that I was introduced to a score of these gentlemen, and their great chief, Mr. Johnson.  I always thought their great chief a great bear.  He drank tea twice or thrice at my house, misbehaving himself most grossly; treating my opinions with no more respect than those of a schoolboy, and telling me to mind my horses and tailors, and not trouble myself about letters.  His Scotch bear-leader, Mr. Boswell, was a butt of the first quality.  I never saw such a figure as the fellow cut in what he called a Corsican habit, at one of Mrs. Cornely’s balls, at Carlisle House, Soho.  But that the stories connected with that same establishment are not the most profitable tales in the world, I could tell tales of scores of queer doings there.  All the high and low demireps of the town gathered there, from his Grace of Ancaster down to my countryman, poor Mr. Oliver Goldsmith the poet, and from the Duchess of Kingston down to the Bird of Paradise, or Kitty Fisher.  Here I have met very queer characters, who came to queer ends too:  poor Hackman, that afterwards was hanged for killing Miss Reay, and (on the sly) his Reverence Doctor Simony, whom my friend Sam Foote, of the ’Little Theatre,’ bade to live even after forgery and the rope cut short the unlucky parson’s career.

It was a merry place, London, in those days, and that’s the truth.  I’m writing now in my gouty old age, and people have grown vastly more moral and matter-of-fact than they were at the close of the last century, when the world was young with me.  There was a difference between a gentleman and a common fellow in those times.  We wore silk and embroidery then.  Now every man has the same coachmanlike look in his belcher and caped coat, and there is no outward difference between my Lord and his groom.  Then it took a man of fashion a couple of hours to make his toilette, and he could show some taste and genius in the selecting it.  What a blaze of splendour was a drawing-room, or an opera, of a gala night!  What sums of money were lost and won at the delicious faro-table!  My gilt curricle and out-riders, blazing in green and gold, were very different objects from the equipages you see nowadays in the ring, with the stunted grooms behind them.  A man could drink four times as much as the milksops nowadays can swallow; but ’tis useless expatiating on this theme.  Gentlemen are dead and gone.  The fashion has now turned upon your soldiers and sailors, and I grow quite moody and sad when I think of thirty years ago.

This is a chapter devoted to reminiscences of what was a very happy and splendid time with me, but presenting little of mark in the way of adventure; as is generally the case when times are happy and easy.  It would seem idle to fill pages with accounts of the every-day occupations of a man of fashion,—­the fair ladies who smiled upon him, the dresses he wore, the matches he played, and won or lost.  At this period