tood the rubicund visage of our Cheltenham friend, Blackstrap, ready to
give us a hearty welcome, and introduce us to Matthew Temple, who making
one of his best bows, led the way into the coffee-room, not forgetting
to assure us that Mistress Temple, who was one of the best women in the
world, would take the greatest care that we had every attention paid to
our commands and comforts; and, in good truth, honest Matthew was right,
for a more comely, good-humoured, attentive, kind hostess exists not in
the three kingdoms of his Gracious Majesty George the Fourth. In short,
Mrs. Temple is the major-domo of the Castle, while honest Matthew,
conscious of his own inability to direct the active operations of the
garrison within doors, beats up for recruits without; attends to all
the stable duty and the commissariat, keeps a sharp look-out for new
arrivals by coach, and a still sharper one that no customer departs
without paying his bill; and thus having made his daily bow to the inns
and the outs, honest Matthew retires at night to take his glass of grog
with the choice spirits who frequent Sportsman's Hall, a snug little
smoking room on the left of the gateway, where the heroes of the turf
and the lads of the fancy nightly assemble to relate their sporting
anecdotes, sing a merry chaunt, book the long odds, and blow a friendly
cloud in social intercourse and good fellowship.

I do not know that it matters much at what end of Bath society I
commence my sketches; and experience has taught me, that the more
fashionable frivolities of high life seldom present the same opportunity
for the ~298~~study of character, which is to be found in the merry,
open-hearted, mirthful meetings of the medium classes and the lower
orders. The pleasure we had felt in Blackstrap's society at Cheltenham,
induced us to engage him to dine in the coffee-room, with our early
friends Heartly and Eglantine, both of whom being then at Bath, we had
invited to meet us, in the expectation that Dick Gradus, having arranged
his legal affairs at Berkeley, would, by the dinner hour, arrive to join
such a rare assemblage of old Eton _cons_--a gratification we had the
pleasure to experience; and never did the festive board resound with
more pleasant reminiscences from old friends: the social hour fled
gaily, and every fresh glass brought its attendant joke. Heartly and
Eglantine had, we found, been sufficiently long in Bath to become very
able instructors to Transit