men might have
devoted to abstract science or metaphysical inquiry, he, with a keen
perception of his own fitness, resolved to exercise upon the world
around him. His botany was a human classification, all his chemistry an
analysis of men's motives. It is true, perhaps, that the poet's line may
have been received by him with a peculiar limitation, and that, if
"the proper study of mankind is man," his investigations took a shape
scarcely contemplated by the writer. It was not man in his freedom of
thought and action, not man in all the consciousness of power, and in
the high hope of a great destiny that attracted him; no! it was for
small humanity that he cared, for all the struggles and wiles and plots
and schemings of this wicked world; for man amid its pomps and vanities,
its balls, its festivals, its intrigues, and its calamities.

He felt, with the great dramatist, that "all the world's a stage,"
and, the better to enjoy the performance, he merely took a "walking
character," that gave him full leisure to watch the others. Such was our
friend Albert Jekyl, or, as he was popularly called by his acquaintance,
Le Due de Dine-out, to distinguish him from the Talleyrands, who are
Dues de Dino.

Let us now, without further speculation, come back to him, as with his
window open to admit the "Arno sun," he lay at full length upon his
ottoman, conning over his dinner list. He had been for some time absent
from Florence, and in the interval a number of new people had arrived,
and some of the old had gone away. He was, therefore, running over the
names of the present and the missing, with a speculative thought for the
future.

"A bad season, it would seem!" muttered he, as his eye traced rapidly
the list of English names, in which none of any distinction figured.
"This comes of Carbonari and Illuminati humbug. They frighten John Bull,
and he will not come abroad to see a barricade under his window. Great
numbers have gone away, too, the Scotts, the Carringdons, the Hopleys!
three excellent houses; and those dear Milnwoods, who, so lately
'reconciled to Rome,' as the phrase is, 'took out their piety' in Friday
fish-dinners.

"The Russians, too, have left us; the Geroboffskys gone back to their
snows again, and expiating their 'liberal tendencies' by a tour in
Siberia. The Chaptowitsch, recalled in disgrace for asking one of Louis
Philippe's sons to a breakfast! We have got in exchange a few Carlists,
half a dozen 'Legitimi