on himself for having been entrapped into the country.

Yet we should convey an erroneous impression of Mr. Vernon if we
designed, by the words "listless ennui," to depict the slumberous
insipidity of more modern affectation; it was not the ennui of a man to
whom ennui is habitual, it was rather the indolent prostration that fills
up the intervals of excitement. At that day the word blast was unknown;
men had not enough sentiment for satiety. There was a kind of
Bacchanalian fury in the life led by those leaders of fashion, among whom
Mr. Vernon was not the least distinguished; it was a day of deep
drinking, of high play, of jovial, reckless dissipation, of strong
appetite for fun and riot, of four-in-hand coachmanship, of prize-
fighting, of a strange sort of barbarous manliness that strained every
nerve of the constitution,--a race of life in which three fourths of the
competitors died half-way in the hippodrome. What is now the Dandy was
then the Buck; and something of the Buck, though subdued by a chaster
taste than fell to the ordinary members of his class, was apparent in Mr.
Vernon's costume as well as air. Intricate folds of muslin, arranged in
prodigious bows and ends, formed the cravat, which Brummell had not yet
arisen to reform; his hat, of a very peculiar shape, low at the crown and
broad at the brim, was worn with an air of devil-me-care defiance; his
watch-chain, garnished with a profusion of rings and seals, hung low from
his white waistcoat; and the adaptation of his nankeen inexpressibles to
his well-shaped limbs was a masterpiece of art. His whole dress and air
was not what could properly be called foppish, it was rather what at that
time was called "rakish." Few could so closely approach vulgarity
without being vulgar: of that privileged few, Mr. Vernon was one of the
elect.

Farther on, and near the steps descending into the garden, stood a man in