or some other kindly expositor of the follies
of the day, to make a series of designs representing the horrors of a
bachelor's life in chambers, and leading the beholder to think of better
things, and a more wholesome condition. What can be more uncomfortable
than the bachelor's lonely breakfast?--with the black kettle in the
dreary fire in midsummer; or, worse still, with the fire gone out
at Christmas, half an hour after the laundress has quitted the
sitting-room? Into this solitude the owner enters shivering, and has to
commence his day by hunting for coals and wood; and before he begins the
work of a student, has to discharge the duties of a housemaid, vice Mrs.
Flanagan, who is absent without leave. Or, again, what can form a finer
subject for the classical designer than the bachelor's shirt--that
garment which he wants to assume just at dinner-time, and which he finds
without any buttons to fasten it? Then there is the bachelor's return
to chambers, after a merry Christmas holiday, spent in a cosy
country-house, full of pretty faces, and kind welcomes and regrets.
He leaves his portmanteau at the barber's in the Court: he lights his
dismal old candle at the sputtering little lamp on the stair: he enters
the blank familiar room, where the only tokens to greet him, that show
any interest in his personal welfare, are the Christmas bills, which are
lying in wait for him, amiably spread out on his reading-table. Add to
these scenes an appalling picture of bachelor's illness, and the rents
in the Temple will begin to fall from the day of the publication of the
dismal diorama. To be well in chambers is melancholy, and lonely and
selfish enough; but to be ill in chambers--to pass long nights of pain
and watchfulness--to long for the morning and the laundress--to serve
yourself your own medicine by your own watch--to have no other companion
for long hours but your own sickening fancies and fevered thoughts: no
kind hand to give you drink if you are thirsty, or to smooth the hot
pillow that crumples under you,--this, indeed, is a fate so dismal
and tragic, that we shall not enlarge upon its horrors, and shall only
heartily pity those bachelors in the Temple, who brave it every day.

This lot befell Arthur Pendennis after the various excesses which we
have mentioned, and to which he had subjected his unfortunate brains.
One night he went to bed ill, and the next day awoke worse. His only
visitor that day, besides the laundre