es one a melancholy but mixed sensation to see one of the better sort
of this class of politicians, not without talents or learning, absorbed
for fifty years together in the all-engrossing topic of the day:
mounting on it for exercise and recreation of his faculties, like the
great horse at a riding-school, and after his short, improgressive,
untired career, dismounting just where he got up; flying abroad in
continual consternation on the wings of all the newspapers; waving his
arm like a pump-handle in sign of constant change, and spouting out
torrents of puddled politics from his mouth; dead to all interests
but those of the state; seemingly neither older nor wiser for age;
unaccountably enthusiastic, stupidly romantic, and actuated by no other
motive than the mechanical operations of the spirit of newsmongering.(1)

'What things,' exclaims Beaumont in his verses to Ben Jonson, 'have we
not seen done at the Mermaid!

'Then when there hath been thrown
Wit able enough to justify the town
For three days past, wit that might warrant be
For the whole city to talk foolishly!'

I cannot say the same of the Southampton, though it stands on classic
ground, and is connected by vocal tradition with the great names of
the Elizabethan age. What a falling off is here I Our ancestors of
that period seem not only to be older by two hundred years, and
proportionably wiser and wittier than we, but hardly a trace of them is
left, not even the memory of what has been. How should I make my friend
Mounsey stare, if I were to mention the name of my still better friend,
old honest Signor Friscobaldo, the father of Bellafront;--yet his name
was perhaps invented, and the scenes in which he figures unrivalled
might for the first time have been read aloud to thrilling ears on this
very spot! Who reads Decker now? Or if by chance any one awakes the
strings of that ancient lyre, and starts with delight as they yield
wild, broken music, is he not accused of envy to the living Muse? What
would a linen-draper from Holborn think, if I were to ask him after the
clerk of St. Andrew's, the immortal, the forgotten Webster? His name and
his works are no more heard of: though _these_ were written with a pen
of adamant, 'within the red-leaved tables of the heart,' his fame
was 'writ in water.' So perishable is genius, so swift is time, so
fluctuating is knowledge, and so far is it from being true that men
perpetually accumulate the means of improvemen