association with my fellow-fashionables. A man might as well have fled
from his chamber to enjoy comfort in the wards of an hospital. In one of
my marches up and down the _pavé_ of St. James's Street, that treadmill
of gentlemen convicted in the penalty of having nothing to do, I lounged
into the little hotel of the Guards, that stands beside the great hotel
of the gamblers, like a babe under its mamma's wing--the likeness
admirable, though the scale diminutive. That "hour too many," cost me
three games of billiards, my bachelor's house, and one thousand pounds.
This price of sixty minutes startled me a little; and, for a week, I
meditated with some seriousness on the superior gaiety of a life spent
in paving the streets, driving a wagon, or answering the knocker of a
door. But the "hour" again overflowed me. I was walking it off in Regent
Street, when an old fellow-victim met me, and prescribed a trot to
Newmarket. The prescription was taken, and the hour was certainly got
rid of. But the remedy was costly; for my betting-book left me minus ten
thousand pounds. I returned to town like a patient from a
watering-place; relieved of every thing but the disease that took me
there. My last shilling remained among the noble blacklegs; but nothing
could rob me of a fragment of my superfluous time, and I brought even a
tenfold allowance of it back. But every disease has a crisis; and when a
lounge through the streets became at once useless and inconvenient--when
the novelty of being cut by all my noble friends, and of being seduously
followed by that generation who, unlike the fickle world, reserve their
tipstaff attentions for the day of adversity, had lost its zest, and I
was thinking whether time was to be better fought off by a plunge to the
bottom of the Thames, or by the muzzle of one of Manton's hair-
triggers--I was saved by a plunge into the King's Bench. There life was
new, friendship was undisguised, my coat was not an object of scorn, my
exploits were fashion, my duns were inadmissible, and my very captors
were turned into my humble servants. There, too, my nature, always