and drink bad sauterne--a flirtation, which fills all your friends with
alarm, and your writing-desk with love-letters you don't like to burn,
and are afraid of being seen; nay, published, perhaps, one fine day,
that you may go by some d----d pet name ever afterwards!--hunting in a
thick mist--shooting in furze bushes, that "feelingly persuade you what
you are"--"the bowl," as the poets call the bottles of claret that never
warm you, but whose thin stream, like the immortal river,--

"Flows and as it flows, for ever may flow on;"


or the port that warms you indeed: yes, into a bilious headach and a low
fever. Yet all these things are pleasures!--parts of social enjoyment!
They fill out the corners of the grand world--they inspire the minor's
dreams--they pour crowds into St. James's, Doctors' Commons, and Melton
Mowbray--they----Oh! confound them all!--it bores one even to write
about them.

Only just returned to London, and, after so bright a panegyric on it,
I already weary of the variety of its samenesses. Shall I not risk the
fate of Faust, and fall in love--ponderously and _bonâ fide_? Or
shall I go among the shades of the deceased, and amuse myself with
chatting to Dido and Julius Caesar? Verily, reader, I leave you for the
present to guess my determination.

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