l splendour; yonder poor invalid crawling along in her
chair; yonder jolly fat lady examining the Brighton pebbles (I
actually once saw a lady buy one), and her children wondering at
the sticking-plaister portraits with gold hair, and gold stocks,
and prodigious high-heeled boots, miracles of art, and cheap at
seven-and-sixpence! It is the fashion to run down George IV., but what
myriads of Londoners ought to thank him for inventing Brighton! One of
the best of physicians our city has ever known, is kind, cheerful, merry
Doctor Brighton. Hail, thou purveyor of shrimps and honest prescriber of
Southdown mutton! There is no mutton so good as Brighton mutton; no flys
so pleasant as Brighton flys; nor any cliff so pleasant to ride on; no
shops so beautiful to look at as the Brighton gimcrack shops, and the
fruit shops, and the market. I fancy myself in Mrs. Honeyman's lodgings
in Steyne Gardens, and in enjoyment of all these things.

If the gracious reader has had losses in life, losses not so bad as to
cause absolute want, or inflict upon him or her the bodily injury of
starvation, let him confess that the evils of this poverty are by no
means so great as his timorous fancy depicted. Say your money has been
invested in West Diddlesex bonds, or other luckless speculations--the
news of the smash comes; you pay your outlying bills with the balance at
the banker's; you assemble your family and make them a fine speech;
the wife of your bosom goes round and embraces the sons and daughters
seriatim; nestling in your own waistcoat finally, in possession of
which, she says (with tender tears and fond quotations from Holy Writ,
God bless her!), and of the darlings round about, lies all her worldly
treasure: the weeping servants are dismissed, their wages paid in full,
and with a present of prayer- and hymn-books from their mistress; your
elegant house in Harley Street is to let, and you subside into lodgings
in Pentonville, or Kensington, or Brompton. How unlike the mansion where
you paid taxes and distributed elegant hospitality for so many years!

You subside into lodgings, I say, and you find yourself very tolerably
comfortable. I am not sure that in her heart your wife is not happier
than in what she calls her happy days. She will be somebody hereafter:
she was nobody in Harley Street: that is, everybody else in her
visiting-book, take the names all round, was as good as she. They had
the very same entrees, plated ware, men to w