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evening costume, and standing on a scarlet covered daïs, and by the side of a Chair, which, so splendid were its adornments, might, without any amplitude of language, have been termed a Throne, in the council chamber of the Guildhall of the City of London. It was close upon seven in the evening, and, my infirm health notwithstanding, I had a not unpleasant persuasion that dinnertime was at hand.

But how on earth did I contrive to find myself on that daïs? The high places are not for me; of that fact I am fully aware. Below the salt, behind the screen, or in a high-up gallery looking down on festivities in which I was not, personally, privileged to participate, was, I knew full well, the proper and normal position which I should have occupied. How had I come hither? Physically, by means of the Metropolitan Railway from South Kensington to Cannonstreet, and thence on my legs to Guildhall. But, morally, fortune, fate, chance, my kismet," my star, my good or evil genius, had brought me to this pass; and, being there, I will not conceal the fact that I felt horribly uncomfortable. I am not fond of thrusting myself where I am not wanted. I shun the society of the great. I never talk to people in omnibuses, or railway rains, or at hotel table d'hôtes. I don't know the members of my own club. I don't know my fellow-shopmen in the establishment where I serve. I never picked up a friend at a watering-place. I never made but one chance acquaintance in my life. He was a charming man, and gave me his card; and a few days afterwards I read in the papers that he had been brought up at Bow-street on a charge of bigamy. Not but that a bigamist may be charming.

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the company might think I was a waiter despatched from the hall to say that dinner was ready. That fiction perhaps might go down with the First Lord of the Admiralty, or the Queen's Ancient Sergeant, or the Chilian chargé d'affaires (they were all close to me); but I was guiltily conscious that the idea would not be for one moment entertained by certain officials of the corporation, whom I saw standing below the "haut pas" on the floor of the council chamber. I felt that the mace-bearer's eye was upon me. I shrank beneath the searching gaze of the common crier. What would I not have given to conciliate the placid old gentleman who wears the fur porringer on his head, and carries the sword of civic state? They knew full well that I was not present to proclaim the readiness of the banquet. Familiar with the minutest traditions of municipal hospitality, they knew that dinner would be announced by a personage in a court-suit, and with a flourish of trumpets. When you find yourself in places where you have no ostensible right to be present, there always remains open the loophole of saying that you are "a gentleman connected with the press. But, woe is me! on the evening of the Ninth of November I had not the remotest connexion with the press; and I had, besides, the uneasy consciousness that several gentlemen really affiliated to that valuable institution, and formerly my colleagues thereupon, were surveying me scornfully from afar off, and whispering among themselves, "Just like his confounded impudence. How the deuce did he get there?" It wasn't my fault. I owed my card of invitation to the banquet to the courtesy of a deservedly popular But I was desperately wretched on the sheriff, and at an earlier period of the daïs because I happened to be the only evening, after making my way to the daïs, person there in plain evening dress. "They and paying the customary obeisances to can't take me for the American minister,' the chief magistrate, I had endeavoured I reasoned with myself, "because the name quietly to slip into the background, or into of his Excellency, who is standing within some quiet corridor, where, behind some half a dozen paces of me, has been twice bust, or flowering plant, I might see the called out in the hearing of the brilliant grand folks passing in procession to the assembly; and, besides, being a general banqueting - hall. Woe! I was standing officer in the American service, he is attired tranquilly on a common councillor's toes, in a uniform closely resembling that of a and behind the towering chignon of a British rear-adıniral. Nor can it be as-deputy's wife, when I was amicably taker sumed that I am the minister from Liberia; for, lo, he is black." For a moment I took cowardly refuge in the thought that I might pass for an M.P. for an Irish constituency; but alas! all the members of the Honourable House on the daïs had had their styles and titles proclaimed. I indulged at last in the humble hope that

into custody by an under-sheriff, and informed that I was to escort the daughter of an exalted civic functionary to the hall. I do declare that, at that moment, I would have preferred the tap on the shoulder from a sheriff's officer to the friendly message of the under-sheriff; but mightier magnificoes remained behind. The under-sheriff

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bishop-on the steps of the Athenæum,
and holding him in familiar converse, on
the strength of having sat next to him at
a meeting of the Society for suppressing
Indigence by means of the Lash. I say
that there are people who can do these
things. I aver, candidly, that I cannot;
and I thank my stars that I have still
nerves and ideas befitting the lowliness of
my station, and that I am heartily fright-
ened of the Lord Chancellor.
On that me-

himself was a sight splendid to behold. Point-lace cravat, embroidered waistcoat, cut-steel buttons, bright-hilted sword, bagwig, pink silk legs, patent leather shoes, every sumptuary luxury had been bestowed upon him. Better," I thought, inwardly groaning, "the hooked nose and greasy surtout of Mr. Rabshekah of Chancery-lane.' There was no help. Clearly there was no making a run for it. I gave myself up, with dogged resignation, to Fate, as though the under-sheriff's summons had only been pre-morable Ninth his lordship's golden robe liminary to the apparition of another municipal functionary on the scene-with the night-cap and the pinioning straps.

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rustled against me; and some of the powder from his ambrosial wig actually came off on my nose. I saw his shoes-his glorious buckled shoes. Hitherto I had only known chancellors from the waist upwards, as we know one of Mr. Attenborough's assistants. I felt faint. Reason tottered on her throne. Was I, by the act of standing on that daïs, in contempt of the High Court of Chancery? Should I fling myself at the cancellarian feet and cry, Mercy. I unfile all my bills; I revoke all my answers; I will consent to the costs being costs in the cause: only forgive and spare me the terrors of the Third Seal?" I am not an eavesdropper; but from my propinquity I could not choose but hear that the Keeper of the Queen's Conscience was talking to a Justice in Eyre about the weather. Justices in Eyre, bah! they were drugs in this market of splendour. I mentally snapped my fingers at them. The Corps Diplomatique, the Elder Brethren of the Trinity House, the Court of Lieutenancy, and such small deer, I took but little account of. I had touched the wig of the greatest personage in all this realm of England-except the MAYOR.

There are some people who could have borne this kind of thing with perfect equanimity; ; nay, who would have found themselves quite at home on this square island of scarlet cloth, in the midst of an ocean of gas and watchful eyes. I don't speak of those who are to the manner born. Of course, the Chancellor of the Exchequer can meet the gaze of the Home Secretary without quailing. The plenipotentiary from the Venezuelan Republic is not afraid of the minister from Honduras, and the Prime Minister is not afraid of anybody. These good folks are upon terms of mutual equality; but, on the other hand, I know several Toms, and Dicks, and Harrys, members, as I am, of the "lower middle classes," who can stand any amount of aristocratic fill without flinching. They like to be among their betters, and so let them know that they, Tom, Dick, and Harry, are there. Observe Tom when, as secretary to the Invalided Rabbit-skin Sellers' Association, he welcomes the Duke of Haresfoot to the annual dinner, at which Ay! there he was, in his golden prime, his grace is to take the chair. He patronises and at once recalled the legend of the Irrethe august nobleman; I saw him once poke verent being who contemned the worshipful the peer in the ribs as his grace was taking mayor of Frogborough. That landlord who his coffee after the banquet. He was telling resented the outrage was, after all, in the him a funny story, evidently. Could you right. What were chancellors, premiers, tell a funny story to a duke? I couldn't. ambassadors, bishops, justices in Eyre, and Admire Dick, again, when he meets the elder brethren of the Trinity House, on this Earl of Sablejamb-whom he saw last instant Ninth of November in comparison year at Homburg-when he comes across with the mayor of famous London town? I him in Pall Mall. "Halloa! old fellow," could not help at the same time bringing to he cries, "what a jolly time of it we had mind that drolly exaggerated account of a when we last met." Sablejamb, who is as lord mayor's career given by Theodore Hook proud as Lucifer, save when he wants to in Gilbert Gurney; and that dismally draborrow a ten-pound note, tries hard to matic scene conjured up by the novelist of cross the road; but the unabashed Dick the ex-lord mayor returning on the night of pursues him, shouting out an invitation for the expiration of his year of splendour to his my lord to come and dine with him at the drysalter's warehouse in a dingy City lane. Rollicking Rams' Club-a dreadful place, All his good fellowship with his majesty's with a nominal subscription, and where ministers and the foreign ambassadors had they drink beer from the pewter. Marvel come to an end. No more did his wife and at Harry button-holing a bishop-a live | daughters dance with princes and nobles.

He had reverted once more to the rank of a mere vulgar Cit; and shortly afterwards, walking on the Steyne at Brighton with his family, he-only a few days since lord mayor, and the entertainer of princeswas horrified at being accosted by a brother tradesman who reminded him that he owed him sundry shillings for a barrel of coal-tar used for painting a pigstye.

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I looked up to see whether Gog and Magog were still in their old places. Yes; the affable giants were, as usual, on guard: but they were perfectly sober. So were the eight hundred and seventy-two guests beneath them. Everybody sat demurely at table; nobody was under it. People who should have been cracking t'other bottle were trifling with water-ice and wafer-cakes; and shortly after the termination of the Premier's speech, I distinctly heard a common councilman observe to a

Lord Mayor's fool to jump into it as in the olden time; and I had been taught by attentive study of City traditions that the guests at Guildhall on the Ninth of November ought to "wallow in custard." There were no sprats. Should not the first sprats of the season be served at the Lord Mayor's table in Guildhall? The loving-cup went round; and the usual When I had gotten over my fright about expressive pantomime went on among the the dais and the big-wigs upon it, and had guests who partook of that famous walked demurely in the skirts of the pro'drinkhael," but it branched off somehow cession round the tables of the banqueting- before it reached me; and I still lack hall-the lovely and accomplished daughter" some one to love," in a parcel-gilt goblet. of the civic dignitary to whom I gave my trembling arm little knew how much more in need of her smelling-bottle I was than she could be-when I had got comfortably wedged in my seat at table, between an affable gentleman in a blue coat thickly splashed with gold-I fear that he had something to do with the r-y-l householdand the domestic chaplain of an aldermanic or shrieval grandee; when the view of my neighbours opposite was happily obstructed by a colossal epergne piled high with grapes, and surmounted by a hot-secondary, that he should like to slip out house pine, on which, when the company rose at the bidding of the toast-master, I felt inclined to browse, as a cameleopard nibbles at the topmost branches of a tall tree; when the dishes of passing waiters behind me had been accurately dug between my eighth and ninth dorsal vertebræ; when I had heard the Guards' band discoursing sweet music in the gallery; and when in fine the banquet, and the clattering of plates, and the chinking of glasses, and the popping of champagne corks had come to an end, and we had leisure for a little ice and fruit, and quiet chat before the speech-making began, I could not help thinking that the times-so far as civic festivities were concerned-had altered very wonderfully since the days of Theodore Hook. Where were the guttling and guzzling and gormandising one used to hear about as chronic at City banquets? We had, it is true, turtle, both thick and clear; but I heard no squabbles about callipash and callipee, no clamorous demands for green fat; and I observed that an alderman at the next table to mine positively ordered jullienne soup and eschewed turtle altogether. My neighbour in the coat splashed with gold dined on the wing of a pheasant and a tumbler of hock-and-seltzer; and to my amazement I perceived that a decanter of port by the side of the domestic chaplain remained wholly untasted throughout the evening. There was no custard, and no

and get a quiet cigar. A common councilman wishing to smoke! He wore a full beard and moustache also, which increased my astonishment. There were no marrowbones. There were no peacocks, served with their tails displayed, nor did I see any ruffs and reeves. Vast sirloins of beef were indeed carved with much state and ceremony, in lofty pulpits on either side of the porch of entrance; but the beef was cold. The entire dinner, in fact, save at the upper table, where an elegant repast à la Russe was served, was cold. It might have been a collation given to inaugurate the opening of a new branch of the Dan, Beersheba, and Domdaniel Railway. It much more resembled an elegant and business-like reunion of that nature, than such a revolting display of coarse gluttony and wine-bibbing as is pictured by Hogarth in his Sheriff's Feast plate in Industry and Idleness.

I was quite satisfied, however, after having frugally, but succulently, dined on a plate of turtle, a spoonful of lobstersalad, a preserved greengage, some ice pudding, and several filberts. I had never been in Guildhall before on a festive occasion. The sight to me was a really glorious one; and I delighted in it because it had been my fortune to witness some of the most memorable of the pageantries which have occurred during my time. Yes, I had witnessed very nearly all of them; and, if

Mrs. Ridgway of Hapsbury, I did not venture to write to her. Thus the links were all severed; and the little I knew of those who had been and were still so dear to me, was by rumour, some faint echo of which penetrated even to my solitude.

The fact is, my poor friend's course was a downward one from the time Assunta married. He became utterly reckless, and led a life of dissipation during the few months he remained with Mr. Strahan, after the morning when I broke the fatal news to him, which divided us further every day. His associates were very distasteful to me; but I would not have shrunk from them, if my joining the parties to which he constantly invited me would have done him any good; but it would not; and as I had to work very hard for my bread at that time, the interruption of labour would have been serious. Then followed that gradual slackening of intimacy which

not as a guest, at least as a spectator I had watched the pomps and vanities of most of the great ones of the earth-except the Mayor. Having seen him, I may humbly express my opinion that, although his surroundings have somewhat changed, he himself is not in the least altered, but is as powerful and influential a chief magistrate as ever a Whittington or a Gresham has been among his predecessors. The Men in Brass cumber his pageant no more; and his barge is laid up in ordinary. He has ceased to go swan-hopping, and it is a long time since he has shut the gates of Temple Bar in the face of royalty. He might even, perhaps, be able to dispense with Gog and Magog, and the City marshal, and the placid old retainer with the fur porringer on his head; but he would still be the Head of the most ancient, the most charitable, the most hospitable city in the world. I thought, as I wended my way homewards after the dinner, is inevitable when the tenour of one man's smoking that cigar which the common life is a silent protest against his friend's. councilman had longed for, that there Between him and his uncle the feud remight be a good many things in the City mained unhealed, and he never saw the of London requiring, if not abolition, at squire again alive. Mr. Walbrooke, who least thorough reform. Perhaps the reve- might be said to be still in the prime of nues of the Battledore and Shuttlecock life, and whose obstinacy-not to speak Makers' Company are slightly mismanaged. of his affection would have suffered Perhaps St. Wapshot's Hospital is not quite keenly in disinheriting Harry, and so in the state it should be. Certainly the con- owning himself worsted in the long-susgregationless City churches should be dis- tained contest with his favourite nephew, established. Assuredly St. Paul's-church- delayed altering his will from week to yard needs re-arrangement. Indubitably week, in the hope that speedy ruin might Temple Bar should go by the board. "Re- bring the wretched boy to seek forgiveness. volution may come," I muttered somewhat The strong man, in his pride, had no sleepily alighting from my cab, "revolution thought of being dispossessed; but one may upset most things for aught I care- stronger than he came suddenly into his except the Mayor. He is a better Chief house by night, and in the morning Squire Citizen than any prefect, syndic, burgo- Walbrooke of the Grange lay dead. By a master, or gonfaloniere that I wot of." will, dated five years before, all his landed Whereupon I went to bed, and dreamt of estates passed to Harry, charged with a that untasted loving-cup, and that every-large jointure to Mrs. Walbrooke, and a body had partaken of itcertain sum to Lena. And so it came to Mayor. pass that, in her bitter irony, Fortune cast this ill-deserved gift at Harry's feet-just nine months too late to save him from life

except the

GEOFFREY LUTTRELL'S NARRATIVE. | long ruin and misery. Ah, had Assunta

BY THE AUTHOR OF "IN THAT STATE OF LIFE," &c

IN ELEVEN CHAPTERS. CHAPTER IX.

THE course of events during the next four years may be briefly told. As regards my life, and those with which it had hitherto been so closely bound, circumstances had separated us completely. Harry Walbrooke and I scarcely ever met now; and yet he was master of the Grange. The squire was dead; Mrs. Walbrooke and Lena were abroad; and as I never heard from

but waited! How cruel it seemed!

The young squire went down and took possession of the Grange, and his connexion with Strahan's of course ceased. But a number of so-called "friends," whom he had made in his short London career, followed him ere long, and every fast man from Oxford, and every needy sportsman in the county, who wanted a good mount and cared for a good bottle of claret, found his way to the Grange. In such company I should have been very much out of

place; these men and I had no one idea in deavours to learn all I possibly could of common, and to witness their orgies, and to Mrs. Ridgway, the information I gained was see foolish, generous-hearted Harry allow-but meagre. Mr. Ridgway and his wife led ing his substance to be devoured by these a very secluded life. They had no children. vultures would have only made me angry. Mrs. Ridgway was not supposed to be a I refused all his pressing invitations. "If happy woman; but very little seemed to be you ever are alone, and want me, I will known about her. Mr. Ridgway discouraged come to you," I said, "but not when your intimacy with any neighbours. At certain army of swashbucklers is with you- stated intervals he received them all with don't ask me." And he did not after a sumptuous courtesy (I believe it would be while. I heard of him, alas! from time to a misuse of the word to call it hospitality); time, and what I heard was as bad as it for, since his marriage, most of those who could well be. The life at the Grange was had kept aloof from him, had come forward, a scandal to the whole county; it was said and for the sake of the young wife were that there was scarcely a night that the disposed to forget any sinister rumours reyoung squire went to bed sober, and even garding the husband. But it was as though once in the hunting-field he had been in a he said, "Now that I have conquered these condition which necessitated his being people, they shall see that I care nothing taken home. His uncle's old friends for their society. They receive me; they (particularly those who had marriageable come to my house; it is enough." He dedaughters) bore with this state of things clined all invitations. A few savants, as long as it was possible; but when every dilettanti, and stray foreigners of various effort to lure him into the decent, if dull, kinds, stayed at Hapsbury from time to society of the neighbourhood proved abor- time; and sometimes the magnates of those tive, they gave him up; it was felt to be parts were bidden to meet them. This, as impossible for steady old fathers of families far as I could gather, was the only interto continue going to the Grange. course between Mr. and Mrs. Ridgway and their neighbours.

Harry and Assunta had never met, nor were they likely to do so, though living only twenty-five miles apart; inasmuch as Mrs. Ridgway, of Hapsbury, it was said, never went outside the park gates, and within them the young squire had, of course, never set foot. His animosity against Mr. Ridgway was well known, and broke out on the mere mention of that gentleman's name into the bitterest scoffs; but of the lady he was never known to speak. Rumours of the life she led I suppose must have reached him; he must have heard of her through Lena, who corresponded with her friend from time to time. But these letters would have told him little of the truth, as he must have known; and it is certain that, from the moment he heard of her marriage, he ceased to try and hold any sort of communication with the object of his unhappy passion. Perhaps I was the only person in the world who guessed that he had not forgotten her; and that he vainly imagined the life of violent exercise and moral excess would act as a styptic to the wound which still bled when it was touched. Not that he ever spoke to me of her, even in the early days of wrath and bitterness; indeed, he expressly begged me never to allude to the past, or to anything that should remind him of his loss.

It only remains for me to add, before I take up the thread of my narrative again, that, in spite of constant and anxious en

It chanced in the February of 1831 that I had occasion to make a journey to Peterborough on professional business. During my stay there, I learnt that the day coach from that city to York passed within a few miles of Hapsbury, which was not more than forty miles from Peterborough. My business concluded, I was in no special hurry to return home, and a temptation, which will sound strange to many, urged me, now I was so near, to go on to Hapsbury, or at least into its immediate vicinity, and learn what I could of my poor Assunta, even if I was unable to see her, for I had been given to understand that Mrs. Ridgway was generally denied to morning visitors. Acting upon this impulse, which I found irresistible, I took my place in the coach one morning, and was at the small town of L. early in the afternoon. From there, with a knapsack on my back, I walked over to the village of Hapsbury, some six miles distant. There had been a long drought, and the road was as deep in limestone dust as though it had been summer, the result of which was that my old painting-blouse and cap, my hair, eyelashes, every part of my outward man, was thickly powdered over, and I resembled nothing so much as an indigent baker or bricklayer out of work. In fact, one charitably-minded old gentleman on a cob did actually throw me sixpence, for which

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