at you were so benevolent,
that you daily granted to some one or other, the greatest happiness in
your power: it is a happiness I am now about to enjoy, and it consists
in wishing you 'good bye!'" And without waiting for Mr. Wormwood's
answer, I gave the rein to my horse, and was soon lost among the crowd,
which had now began to assemble.

Hyde Park is a stupid place; the English make business an enjoyment,
and enjoyment a business--they are born without a smile--they rove about
public places like so many easterly winds--cold, sharp, and cutting; or
like a group of fogs on a frosty day, sent out of his hall by Boreas for
the express purpose of looking black at one another. When they ask you,
"how you do," you would think they were measuring the length of your
coffin. They are ever, it is true, labouring to be agreeable; but they
are like Sisyphus, the stone they roll up the hill with so much toil,
runs down again, and hits you a thump on the legs. They are sometimes
polite, but invariably uncivil; their warmth is always artificial--their
cold never, they are stiff without dignity, and cringing without
manners. They offer you an affront, and call it "plain truth;" they
wound your feelings, and tell you it is manly "to speak their minds;" at
the same time, while they have neglected all the graces and charities
of artifice, they have adopted all its falsehood and deceit. While they
profess to abhor servility, they adulate the peerage--while they tell
you they care not a rush for the minister, they move heaven and earth
for an invitation from the minister's wife. There is not another court
in Europe where such systematized meanness is carried on,--where they
will even believe you, when you assert that it exists. Abroad, you
can smile at the vanity of one class, and the flattery of another: the
first, is too well bred to affront, the latter, too graceful to disgust;
but here, the pride of a noblesse, (by the way, the most mushroom
in Europe,) knocks you down in a hail-storm, and the fawning of the
bourgeois makes you sick with hot water. Then their amusements--the
heat--the dust--the sameness--the slowness of that odious park in the
morning; and the same exquisite scene repeated in the evening, on the
condensed stage of a rout-room, where one has more heat, with less
air, and a narrower dungeon, with diminished possibility of escape!--we
wander about like the damned in the story of Vathek, and we pass our
lives, like the roy