and to write Latin, and were thrust into Brooks’s before they knew the difference in value between a farthing and a banknote:  at nineteen they were hardened rake, or accomplished men of the world, or both.  Dissipated noblemen of middle age like March and Sandwich, wits and beaus and fine gentlemen like Selwyn and Chesterfield and Walpole, were familiarly called by their first names by youngsters like Fox and Carlisle and Comyn.  Difference of age was no difference.  Young Lord Carlisle was the intimate of Mr. Selwyn, born thirty years before him.

And whilst I am speaking of intimacies, that short one which sprang up between me and the renowned Charles Fox has always seemed the most unaccountable:  not on my part, for I fell a victim to him at once.  Pen and paper, brush and canvas, are wholly inadequate to describe the charm of the man.  When he desired to please, his conversation and the expression of his face must have moved a temperament of stone itself.  None ever had more devoted friends or more ardent admirers.  They saw his faults, which he laid bare before them, but they settled his debts again and again, vast sums which he lost at Newmarket and at Brooks’s.  And not many years after the time of which I now write Lord Carlisle was paying fifteen hundred a year on the sum he had loaned him, cheerfully denying himself the pleasures of London as a consequence.

It was Mr. Fox who discovered for me my lodgings in Dover Street, vowing that I could not be so out of fashion as to live at an inn.  The brief history of these rooms, as given by him, was this:  “A young cub had owned them, whose mamma had come up from Berkshire on Thursday, beat him soundly on Friday, paid his debts on Saturday, and had taken him back on Sunday to hunt with Sir Henry the rest of his life.”  Dorothy came one day with her mother and swept through my apartments, commanded all the furniture to be moved about, ordered me to get pictures for the walls, and by one fell decree abolished all the ornaments before the landlady, used as she was to the ways of quality, had time to gasp.

“Why, Richard,” says my lady, “you will be wanting no end of pretty things to take back to Maryland when you go.  You shall come with me to-morrow to Mr. Josiah Wedgwood’s, to choose some of them.”

“Dorothy!” says her mother, reprovingly.

“And he must have the Chippendale table I saw yesterday at the exhibition, and chairs to match.  And every bachelor should have a punch bowl—­Josiah has such a beauty!”

But I am running far ahead.  Among the notes with which my table was laden, Banks had found a scrawl.  This I made out with difficulty to convey that Mr. Fox was not attending Parliament that day.  If Mr. Carvel would do him the honour of calling at his lodging, over Mackie’s Italian Warehouse in Piccadilly, at four o’clock, he would take great pleasure in introducing him at Brooks’s Club.  In those days ’twas far better for a young gentleman