man."

"Indeed! Oh, how I long to see him!"

"Well, perhaps you may one of these days. Bristles--my friend Bristles
of the _Universal_-says he's a perfect--what do they call that pretty
street in Southampton?--Paragon--a perfect paragon, Bristles says:
I'll ask him to dinner some day."

"What day?--Oh, let it be soon, dear papa!"

"There's a dear delightful enthusiastic girl! We ought to encourage
people of genius. Curious we never heard of him before, for he was our
neighbour, I hear, in Finsbury; but poor, I suppose, and did not mix
with our set even then."

Mr Pitskiver looked at the opposite side of the street while he spoke,
as if to assure himself that he was in a still higher altitude above
the poet now than some few years before. But, as if feeling called on
to show his increased superiority by greater condescension, he said,
as he walked out of the room, "I shall certainly have him to dinner,
and Bristles, and some more men of talent to meet him--

'The feast of reason, and the flow of soul!'"

the only quotation, by the way, in which Mr Pitskiver was ever known
to indulge.

CHAPTER III.

Miss Hendy had formerly kept a school, and her portrait would have
done very well for a frontispiece to Mrs Trimmer. She was what is
called prim in her manner, and as delicate as an American. She always
called the legs of a table its props--for the word legs was highly
unfeminine. She admired talent, and gave it vast quantities of tea and
toast. Her drawing-room was a temple of the Muses, and only open to
those who were bountifully endowed with the gifts of nature or of
fortune; for she considered it a great part of her duty to act as a
kind of link between Plutus and Minerva. In the effort to discover
objects worthy of her recommendation, she was mainly aided by the
celebrated Mr Bristles. Every month whole troops of Herschels and
Wordsworths, and Humes and Gibbons, were presented to her by the great
critic; and with a devout faith in all he told her, she listened
enraptured to the praises of those astonishing geniuses, till she had
begun to enter into Mr Bristles's own feelings of contempt for every
body except the favoured few. And to-night was the grand debut of a
more remarkable phenomenon than any of the others. A youth of
twenty-three, tall, modest, intellectual, and long-haired--in short,
the "Ticket"--was to read the opening of a tragedy; and sculptors,
painters, mechanicians, and city Croesuses,