ming to the rule, and becoming
different from what we had been. The dream of home, the ever-present
thought to the exile's mind, suffers the rude shock when comes the hour
of testing its reality; happy for him if he die in the delusion! Early
remembrances are hallowed by a light that age and experience dissipate
for ever, and as the highland tarn we used to think grand in its wild
desolation in the hours of our boyhood becomes to our manhoods eye but
a mere pond among the mountains, so do we look with changed feelings on
all about us, and feel disappointment where we expected pleasure.

In all great cities these changes succeed with fearful rapidity.
Expensive tastes and extravagant habits are hourly ruining hundreds
who pass off the scene where they shone, and are heard of no more. The
'lion' of the season--whose plate was a matter of royal curiosity,
whose equipage gave the tone to the time, whose dinner invitations were
regarded as the climax of fashionable distinction--awakes some morning
to discover that an expenditure of four times a man's income, continued
for several years, may originate embarrassment in his affairs. He finds
out that tailors can be uncivil, and coachmakers rude and--horror
of horrors!--he sees within the precincts of his dressing-room the
plebeian visage of a sherrifs officer, or the calculating countenance of
a West-End auctioneer.

He who was booked for Ascot now hurries away to Antwerp. An ambiguous
paragraph in an evening paper informs London that one among the ranks of
extravagance has fallen; a notice of 'public competition' by the hand of
George Robins comes next; a criticism, and generally a sharp one, on the
taste of his furniture and the value of his pictures follows; the broad
pages of the _Morning Post_ become the winding-sheet of his memory,
and the knock of the auctioneer's hammer is his requiem! The ink is
not dried on his passport ere he is forgotten. Fashionable circles have
other occupations than regrets and condolences; so that the exile may
be a proud man if he retain a single correspondent in that great world
which yesterday found nothing better than to chronicle his doings.

When Sir Harry Wycherley then came back to London he was only remembered
--nothing more. The great majority of his contemporaries had, like
himself, passed off the boards during the interval; such of them as
remained were either like vessels too crippled in action to seek safety
in flight, or, adopti