Art thou old enough, O reader! to remember the Bond Street Lounger and
his incomparable generation? For my part, I can just recall the decline
of the grand era. It was on its wane when, in the ambition of boyhood,
I first began to muse upon high neck cloths and Wellington boots. But
the ancient /habitues/--the /magni nominis umbrae/, contemporaries of
Brummell in his zenith, boon companions of George IV. in his regency--
still haunted the spot. From four to six in the hot month of June, they
sauntered stately to and fro, looking somewhat mournful even then,
foreboding the extinction of their race. The Bond Street Lounger was
rarely seen alone: he was a social animal, and walked arm in arm with his
fellow-man. He did not seem born for the cares of these ruder times; not
made was he for an age in which Finsbury returns members to parliament.
He loved his small talk; and never since then has talk been so pleasingly
small. Your true Bond Street Lounger had a very dissipated look. His
youth had been spent with heroes who loved their bottle. He himself had
perhaps supped with Sheridan. He was by nature a spendthrift: you saw it
in the roll of his walk. Men who make money rarely saunter; men who save
money rarely swagger. But saunter and swagger both united to stamp
PRODIGAL on the Bond Street Lounger. And so familiar as he was with his
own set, and so amusingly supercilious with the vulgar residue of mortals
whose faces were strange to Bond Street! But he is gone. The world,
though sadder for his loss, still strives to do its best without him; and
our young men, nowadays, attend to model cottages, and incline to
Tractarianism. Still the place, to an unreflecting eye, has its
brilliancy and bustle; but it is a thoroughfare, not a lounge. And adown
the thoroughfare, somewhat before the hour when the throng is thickest,
passed two gentlemen of an appearance exceedingly out of keeping with the
place.--Yet both had the air of men pretending to aristocracy,--an old-
world air of respectability and stake in the country, and Church-and-
Stateism. The burlier of the two was even rather a beau in his way. He