e _fete_. An
amorous Hebrew city clerk, who had long '_looked and loved_' at humble
distance, taking advantage of his uncle's absence on the continent in
a _diamond hunting_ speculation, having left the immediate jewel of His
soul, his cash, at home, the enamoured youth seized the very 'nick o'
time,' furnished half the funds for the night, for half a morning's
conversation in Upper Y--street: her ladyship's indefatigable industry
furnished the other moiety in a couple of days. A Mr. Z--ch--y
contributed fifty, which coming to the ears of his sandy-haired lassie,
his own paid forfeit of his folly, to their almost total abstraction
from the thick head to which they project with asinine pride. Since this
splash in the whirlpool of fashionable folly, her 'ladyship,' for she
clings to the rank with all the tenacity of a fencible field officer,
has lived in comparative retirement near E--dg--e R--d, nursing a
bantling of the new era, and singing '_John Anderson my Joe_' to her now
'gude man;' only occasionally relapsing into former gaieties by a sly
trip to Box Hill or Virginia Water with the grandson of a barber, a
flush but gawky boy, who, forgetting that it is to the talents and
judicial virtues of his honoured sire he owes his elevation, rejects
that proud and wholesome example; and, by his arrogance and vanity,
excites pity for the father and contempt for the son. Her ladyship, who
by her own confession has been 'just nine and twenty' for the last
ten years, may still boast of her conquests. Her amour with the _yellow
dwarf_ of G--vs--r P--e is too good to be lost. They are followed by
one, who, time was, would have chased them round the Steyne ~319~~and
into cover with all the spirit of a true sportsman; but his days
of revelry are past,--that is the celebrated _roue_, C---- L----, a
'_trifle light as air,_' yet in nature's spite a very ultra in the
pursuit of gallantry. To record the number of frail fair ones to whose
charms he owned ephemeral homage would fill a volume. The wantons wife
whose vices sunk her from the drawing-room to the lobby; the{4} kitchen
wench, whose pretty face and lewd ambition raised her to it; the romance
bewildered{5} Miss, and the rude unlettered {6} villager, the hardened
drunken profligate, and the timid half-ruined victim (the almost
infant Jenny!) have all in turn tasted his bounty and his wine, have
each been honoured with a page in his trifles: of his caresses he wisely
was more chary.