66 He comes into the room with half a dozen famous extempore puns, which have cost him a morning's labour to concoct. As long as he can clinch a word, or raise a laugh, he does not care how old, or how bad, his pun is: he will call any one singing in a garret, an attic warbler." He calls a friend of mine a unitharian, because he has but one hair on his head. He addresses a shoemaker, "O sovereign of the willing soul." If you are a Templar, he hopes you may turn your gas into Coke. He is indefatigable in chasing down his pun. He reads only to find out resemblances, and listens only to bring in his pun. He is fond of no play except a play upon words, and yet he makes game of every thing "A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits." His favourite poet is Crabbe, and his light reading, Joe Miller and Dr. Kett. He was educated in the "School for Wits." James the First is his favourite monarch. The only living authors he admires are Tom Dibdin and Mr. Moncrieff: with the last he is sworn brother. He is supposed to have furnished the puns to the latter's farces. His brain is full of "eggs of bon-mots and specks of repartees." If you are in a dilemma and you ask what steps you should take, he recommends the library steps. If you ask him to ring the bell, he, with great solemnity, puts a ring on the finger of some pretty girl. If you object to him that his coat is too short, he tells you it will be long enough before he gets another. In short, he seems to like a good thing in proportion to its age: he has no particular wish to appear as the inventor, but merely the "transmitter" of a jest. These are some of the grievous things which are found about dinner-tables and general society, to the very great disturbance of hilarity. To some they may not appear so disagreeable; to me they are inexpressibly unendurable. A retired student, I come abroad into the world for relaxation and amusement; but what amusement can there be when "so pestered with popinjays ?"-What but an excited bile and dissatisfaction with my kind? Without being very old, yet I think I can remember when these plagues were less numerous and less afflicting. A dinner then was kindly and social; the stream of talk flowed pleasantly, nothing the worse for being shallow; we bubbled without roaring. No one assumed more than his share. But this is an age of usurpations; even the dinner-table is not sacred! Society was once more social; it looked for its delights, and found them, within a small circle. Now it spreads abroad and gathers in all that is confined. It sends its agents into the highways, and does not disdain the hedges. Wiser heads, or those more happily tempered than mine, may bear with these warts and boils of society; and account them but as the breakings-out which only prove the greater health of the body. But I cannot "consider so curiously." I ask not much from society, and cannot afford that the little should be given with so much alloy. I object to so large a charge for seigniorage. The duty eats up the article; the vexation more than counterbalances the pleasure. There is a custom in Italy, when you are invited to dinner, to send a list of all the guests; and if you dislike any of them, you send back the list marked. I wish it were the custom also in England: it would be a public advantage. For my own part, my mind is made up never to dine where I have reason to think I shall meet a traveller, a young Cantab, a merveilleux, a literary butterfly, a "varmint man," or a punster. VOL. IV. No. 23.-1822. H 3 THE TRAVELLER AT HOME. WHOEVER has travelled, must be well aware of the disagreeable sen' sation of strangeness which attends the first day's residence in a for eign capital, before the delivery of letters of recommendation has procured those hospitable attentions, which, in the course of a few hours, ripen casual acquaintance into friendship. It is at this moment that the sensation of loneliness is felt in its keenest intensity. The inhabitants of the city are seen moving to and fro, each with his countenance expressive of some instant object, some active interest; they pass and repass, salute and are saluted, and exhibit to the looker-on a thousand nameless traits, which shew that they are at home. To the stranger no one bows, no one speaks, no one launches the glance of recognition. Even the buildings, in all the interest of their novelty, convey an impression the very reverse of inspiriting, by the total absence of all association of ideas. The spectacle of two friends enjoying the abandonment of unrestricted chit-chat; the sudden glow of pleasure mantling on the cheek of some smiling beauty, at the unexpected rencontre of a favourite youth; the transient interchange of kindly feeling shot from the eye as they pass,-impress upon the stranger a sickening recollection that to such pleasures he has no claim. His heart yearns for some one to address, for some one who will awaken a remembrance; or his imagination turns, perhaps, self-bidden, to domestic scenes, and to the affectionate beings by whom they are inhabited. At such a moment should chance bring the traveller in contact with the most distant acquaintance-a fellow-passenger in a stagean individual met in some large assembly of another town, or encountered in the routine of Lions and sight-seeing on some former occasion, he hails his approach with all the ardour of friendship, and feels, for the instant, as towards a brother. As the eye wanders instinctively over the passing crowd, in the vague search of some such object of recognition, the spirits flag, till feelings almost of ill-will arise towards the population; as if they were guilty of neglect and personal slight, by the indifference with which they pass. With this unreasonable, but, by no means unnatural, pettishness and dislike to all he has seen, rankling in his heart, the stranger, towards the close of evening, flies from the oppressive solitude of the crowd to his lonely inn; and after various efforts to find occupation in the bizarre decorations of the chamber, or, like Belshazzar,* in the handwriting on the wall, from which he "cannot furn away," or, perhaps, in the thousand-times perused livre des postes, -through sheer despair he retires to bed, full two hours before the time when habit should predispose him for sleep. This uneasy and distressing sensation is hardly ever thrown entirely off by the most experienced traveller; though use brings with it a แ It is but seldom that he can ask "Why the dark destinies have hung their sentence Thus visible to the sight, but to the mind Wherever the English travel they contrive to express pretty intelligibly their ennui, their dislike and contempt for foreigners, in moral apothegms, such as Dirty Italian Inn." "D- all Frenchmen." "Stupid Germans." stronger conviction that such circumstances are in the natural order of things. There is, however, a case in which the position of a stranger is accompanied with a tenfold bitterness, in which the spirit revolts with a tenfold sense of injury, from the consciousness of neglect and isolation; and that is, when, after years of absence, he returns to his native city, and finds all the social relations he had left behind him at parting, disturbed or dissolved. The conviction of this melancholy truth, unlike the sense of strangeness in a foreign capital, comes upon us by degrees. The first moments of arrival are, on the contrary, replete with recollections and acknowledgments. The physical objects have remained unchanged. The church we have frequented in our youth, stands where it did; the rows of trees under whose shade we frolicked in our childhood, are still growing; the house inhabited by some early friend remains the same. The first visits, likewise, to our remaining connexions are usually exhilarating and satisfactory: the hearty shake of the hand, the cordial congratulation, the hospitable dinner made in honour of our return, exhibit few signs of change, save those that time has stamped on the countenances of our friends. But by degrees the realities of the position transpire in all their naked unloveliness. A few short conversations suffice to discover, in the minds of our companions, a total break-up of all those associations which subsisted when we left them, and which then bound them to us by similarity of pursuit, of sentiment, or of amusement. The gay thoughtless man of pleasure has settled into the tame, plodding man of business, whose occupations have no leisure for friendship, no opportunity for enjoyment. The single man has married, and has concentrated all his afection upon his wife and children. The companion has changed his pursuits, the friend his connexions; old acquaintances have died, new faces have come upon the scene; boys have grown into manhood, and the girls with whom we used to dance and flirt, have become the mothers of families. In short, the cards of society have been shuffled and cut so often, that no traces remain of the game we left playing at the time of our departure. We ourselves, on the contrary, remain insensible to the operations of time. We mistake the memory of what we have felt for an actual sentiment; and picturing our friends on the intellectual retina with all their primitive associations, surrounded by the bright halo of early sensations and unworn feelings, so different from those colder and more calculating sentiments which attach us to newer acquaintance, we grow young in the recollection; thus taking no account either of the changes which have occurred in ourselves, in our friends, or in the circumstances in which they are placed, we are wholly unprepared for that moral and social dislocation which awaits us, in our endeavours to thrust ourselves once more into a place in society which others have already occupied. The gap we left in the social circle has long been filled up; and we are hurt to find ourselves in the situation of one returned from the grave, after his fortune has been divided amongst thankless heirs, and his loss forgotten by his nearest relations. I myself was born and educated in London, and for the first thirty years of my life was never absent from it, except on those short excursions which return us to our friends the more welcome for our tempo rary retreat. At length, however, circumstances drew me away from home, and carried me out of the sight and recollection of old acquaintances; so that, after an absence of ten years, I returned to my native capital almost an entire stranger. The feeling of melancholy with which, like a ghost, I stalked through the favourite haunts of my former life, and, like a ghost too, sought for some one to relieve me by an interpellation, was beyond description bitter. Every step was taken over a prostrate propensity, or a broken association. But in the irritable state of mind thus produced, every trifle becomes important; and those who have experienced the position, will acknowledge the fidelity of this picture. But much more severe was the shock which attended the necessity of taking shelter in an hotel. The paternal house, whose door had, on each return from school, and on the termination of every country ramble, stood hospitably open to welcome me to an affectionate circle, had now passed into other hands. The circle was broken up; the grave had closed on its dearest members; and the survivors were pursuing fortune in other channels: while strangers occupied the apartments endeared by the most indelible associations. It seemed so unnatural, so cruel to be thus driven from home, that it wore the air of an act of violence. I remember to have experienced, though in less intensity, this feeling of loneliness on visiting the University to take a degree, and finding the contemporary generations replaced by a race of boys and strangers; and this analogous instance, being familiar to many readers, may serve as an illustration to those whose homebred habits have confined them to the spot in which accident first placed them. To those thus fixed and stationary, changes are scarcely sensible; they take place so gradually. Friends die, or drop from the circle but one at a time; and the ranks are filled up before the chasm is perceived: bat to the returning stranger the desolation is apparent in its fullest extent and horror. Every man in London, however obscure his station, is connected with a little circle, or junta, with whom his domestic habits are more intimately entwined. This little knot, made up of friends, of accidental associates, companions of pleasure or of business, passes on with us through life, occasionally broken in upon by casual interlopers, but still holding together with a pertinacity which daily habit serves only to increase. By such a circle we find ourselves surrounded in our father's house; and though age, education, temperament, and disposition, may all tend to alienate the young man from it when he escapes into the world, yet there is none perhaps to which he occasionally returns with more pleasure, or clings to with greater attachment; especially when the parent, who was its centre, is no more. Here, however, it is, that a short time makes the widest and the deepest gashes; for as the individuals are all advanced in life, they are eminently obnoxious to accident and to decay. Nothing can be more painful to the stranger at home, than his return to the remnants of such a circle. The old friendship, the old hilarity, the old jokes are still preserved; but one member has grown deaf, another blind, another doats, a fourth is paralytic; and all seem to be insensible to the loss of those who have dropped into the grave, unconscious of the lapse of time and reckless of its dilapidations. It seems as if a wild and fantastic dream had conjured up the dead to mock at revelry, to feast with the traveller on his return, and welcome him to the spot in which, after all his wanderings, he is to rest for ever. But if friendships are thus pregnant with suffering, the distastes are not less frequent which await the stranger in the scenes of his early amusements. The theatres more especially are the scenes of disappointment. Old favourites are dead; or, what perhaps is still worse, are grown too old for the parts they still sustain. A new race of performers treads the stage, with whose names, persons, and merits, the returned traveller is wholly unacquainted: and because he is himself no longer susceptible of the same vivid sensations, because his imagination no longer lends itself with the same enthusiasm to scenic deception, the present race of actors infallibly appear to possess smaller talent than the actors of his recollection. Whoever is at all conversant with theatrical literature, must have remarked how each generation of critics has dwelt with fondness and regret on the memory of the actors who are gone. Yet perhaps no other art has observed so progressive a march towards perfection, by a constant and steady approach to nature, the rejection of conventional bombast, and rising above received forms of theatrical gesture and elocution. Besides, however, this disgust of satiety, this palling of the imagination, it must be admitted, that the theatres really have lost much of their attraction, through their increased size and consequent turn to show and pantomime. But this is not all. Before the stage lamps changes also have occurred. The race of critics which twenty years ago assembled to discuss the merits of Cooke's Richard, or to enjoy the raciness of poor Lewis's Prince Hal, have disappeared with the actors they admired and the returned traveller might as well be in the Scala at Milan, or the San Carlos of Naples, as in Covent Garden or Drury Lane, for any chance the latter afford of old associates or a sympathizing audience. The idle Templars, who used to retire from the theatre to the coffee-house, who conspired to damn a play or conduct a riot, have now retired to their chambers, and are buried in briefs and cases. They may sometimes, by accident, be found in a church; but the theatre no longer exists for them, even in recollection.-Cætera quid memorem? All the other places of public resort equally lose in the comparison of the present with the past. Vauxhall, if not in extent and in illumination, yet, at least, in gaiety, appears much less to the eye than to the memory; it is stripped of all the decorations which youth, health, and inexperience formerly conferred upon it. The "pleased alacrity and cheer of mind" are wanting, which once gave zest to every amusement; and even the appetite, which formerly enhanced a Vauxhall supper and burnt Champaign, has ceased to disguise the taste of the knife in its wafer-slices of ham, and to shut out from the palate the staleness of the cheesecakes. The only sense which seems awakened to a keener sensibility is the nose: at least, the oil and the steams of rack punch are now more disagreeably predominant, than when last I visited this once favourite resort. Another source of disappointment from which few, even of the resident cockneys, at all advanced in life, escape, arises in the vast increase of buildings, which have sprung up round London. When I was a boy, |