ou to be one,' quoth Sherry, and turned away. It
is due to both the parties to this anecdote to state that it is quite
apocryphal, and rests on the slenderest authority. However, whether fool
or not, Brummell has one certain, though small, claim upon certain small
readers. Were you born in a modern generation, when scraps of poetry
were forbidden in your nursery, and no other pabulum was offered to your
infant stomach, but the rather dull biographies of rather dull, though
very upright men?--if so, I pity you. Old airs of a jaunty jig-like kind
are still haunting the echoes of my brain. Among them is--

'The butterfly was a gentleman,
Which nobody can refute:
He left his lady-love at home,
And roamed in a velvet suit.'

I remember often to have ruminated over this character of an innocent,
and, I believe, calumniated, insect. He was a gentleman, and the
consequences thereof were twofold: he abandoned the young woman who had
trusted her affections to him, and attired his person in a complete
costume of the best Lyons silk-velvet, _not_ the proctor's velvet, which
Theodore felt with thumb and finger, impudently asking 'how much a
yard?' I secretly resolved to do the same thing as Mr. Butterfly when I
came of age. But the said Mr. Butterfly had a varied and somewhat awful
history, all of which was narrated in various ditties chanted by my
nurse. I could not quite join in her vivid assertion that she _would_

'----be a butterfly,
Born in a bower,
Christened in a tea-pot,
And dead in an hour.'

Aetat four, life is dear, and the idea of that early demise was far from
welcome to me. I privily agreed that I would _not_ be a butterfly. But
there was no end to the history of this very inconstant insect in our
nursery lore. We didn't care a drop of honey for Dr. Watts's 'Busy Bee;'
we infinitely preferred the account--not in the 'Morning Post'--of the
'Butterfly's Ball' and the 'Grasshopper's Feast; and few, perhaps, have
ever given children more pleasures of imagination than William Roscoe,
its author. There were some amongst us, however, who were already being
weaned to a knowledge of life's mysterious changes, and we sought the
third volume of the romance of the flitting gaudy thing in a little poem
called 'The Butterfly's Funeral.'

Little dreamed we, when in our prettly little song-books we saw the
initial 'B.' at the bottom of these verses, that a real human butterfly
had written them, and that th