At length I gave way; left the university with my blessing and my debts;
and rushed up to London, as the grand _place d'armes_, the central spot
from which the enemy was excluded by the united strength, wit, and
wisdom of a million and a half of men. I might as well have staid
bird-nesting in Berkshire. I found the happiest contrivances against the
universal invader fail. Pigeon-matches; public dinners; coffee-houses;
bluestocking _reunions_; private morning quadrille practice, with public
evening exhibitions of their fruits; dilettanti breakfasts, with a
bronze Hercules standing among the bread and butter, or a reposing cast
of Venus, fresh from Pompeii, as black and nude as a negress disporting
on the banks of the Senegal, but dear and delicate to the eyes of taste;
Sunday mornings at Tattersal's, jockeying till the churches let out
their population, and the time for visits was come; and Sunday evening
routs at _the_ duchess's, with a cotillon by the _vraies danseuses_ of
the opera, followed by a concert, a round game, and a _select_ supper
for the initiated;--the whole failed. I had always an hour too
much--sixty mortal minutes, and every one of them an hour in itself,
that I could never squeeze down.

"Ye gods, annihilate both space and time,
And make two lovers happy,"

may have been called a not over-modest request; but I can vouch for at
least one half of it being the daily prayer of some thousands of the
best-dressed people that the sun ever summoned to a day of twenty-four
hours long. On feeling the symptoms of this horary visitation, I
regularly rushed into the streets, on the principle that some
alleviation of misery is always to be found in fellow-suffering. This
maxim I invariably found false, like every other piece of the boasted
wisdom of mankind. I found the suffering infinitely increased by the