t so unprofitable to us in the
end was the arrangement effected by the solicitor, that the action was
settled after all on the terms of each party having to pay their own
costs. This preposterous result is referred to in the admirable sketch
entitled _Swindling the Clarendon_, wherein landlord Bull angrily
expostulates with his two waiters (Louis Napoleon and Palmerston),
"What!" says John, "_quite the gentleman_! Why he has left nothing but a
portmantel of bricks and stones, and gone off without paying the
bill."[151]

Just complaints were made in the papers of 1857 of the arrangements, or
rather want of arrangements, at the Royal _levees_. The space was
circumscribed and the crush frightful, and ladies returned from the
ceremony with torn dresses and dishevelled hair, just as if they had
been engaged in some feminine battle-royal. To accustom them to this
uncomfortable but apparently inevitable ordeal, John Leech, in one of
the very best of his sketches (vol. xxxii.), suggested a _Training
School for Ladies about to Appear at Court_, where we see charming women
in court dresses leaping over forms, crowding beneath barriers, and
going through a vigorous course of saltatory exercises, to prepare them
for what they might expect at the ceremony; the floor is strewn with
broken fans, gloves, feathers, watches, and jewellery; while one fat old
lady, who, in attempting to scramble beneath the barrier has become a
permanent fixture, presents a truly comical appearance.

THE ENGLISH DISSATISFIED.

The war was at an end; the "Eastern Question," as it was called in the
political jargon of that day, had been settled for the next twenty
years, and John Bull had now leisure to sit down to count the cost, and
consider the value of the French alliance, and the quality of the
assistance he had derived from French generalship and the French army.
The result of John's calculation was eminently unsatisfactory to
himself, for he felt that while he had done all the hard work and nearly
all the fighting, the French, as might have been expected, had arrogated
to themselves all the praise. John in his secret heart was angry; he
felt he had been drawn into a contest from which he personally derived
little advantage, and from which he emerged nominally triumphant at a
ruinous waste of men and money; the Frenchman, on his part, was doubtful
of the reality of the _gloire_ he claimed for himself, and distinctly
conscious, moreover, that the