world, and exhibited all its vice and pride, with none of its dignity. The father had, by a happy concurrence of circumstances, made a fortune, and his next step was to make himself a family. While he remained in comparative poverty, he cared little whether he had any ancestors or not, but when wealth poured in upon him, he grew very jealous of the idea of regular procreation, and seemed really apprehensive lest some terrible mistake should be made respecting his origin. As his riches increased, so did his ancestors; when he had one thousand a year, his genealogy extended only to one hundred years, and embraced no names of any eminence; but at two thousand, a noble progenitor was beheaded for high treason; at four thousand, he was connected with royalty; and when he retired from business, there was no question that the founder of his race was a Norman Vagabond, attendant on the Conqueror. In establishing his dignity, he was, however, a little puzzled by the brevity and unimportance of his name, which was, simply, John James; but having observed that it was usual in such cases to double the appellation, he thought it would be still more remarkable to repeat it thrice, and, accordingly, denominated himself "John James JamesJames, Esq., of Nutbridge-park." The novelty of his pretensions was not displayed by ordinary vulgarity, but, what was far more insufferable, by excessive politeness and inveterate good breeding. His taste was not indeed aristocratically plain, nor could he refrain from making the footman and footboy, one very tall, and the other as remarkably short, both stand together behind his carriage; but he knew enough of the world to be aware that extravagant show is the last means by which a man of moderate sense would seek to display newly acquired wealth. He insisted that his daughters should dress plainly, though exquisitely; refused his sons permission to drive tandem in a dog-cart; and supplied his groom, whom, by the way, he caused to ride so close behind him as to leave no assignable interval, with a horse much handsomer than his own. But in spite, or rather in consequence, of much study to be polite and easy, an air of pride and vulgar restraint pervaded the whole family. They were proud of everythingof their wealth, their taste, their condescension, but chiefly of their manners. They always came into company with the air of wild beasts imperfectly tamed, and their father bore so exactly the aspect of a showman, that, when he began to say this is my son John, or my daughter Jane, the guest would not have been surprised, had he procecded to detail the circumstances of their capture, and the mode of their subsequent discipline. His children themselves lived, like Tantalus, in perpetual dread, fearing lest some breach of good manners should fall on their devoted heads. Of that perfection of art which consists in the concealment of art they had no conception. They were constantly talking of politeness. Their intention in inviting Maurice, was to overwhelm him with alternate pleasure and mortification, and send him home deeply impressed with his own meanness and their superiority. On the first day he afforded them much entertainment, by his hungry amazement at the delay of dinner. At two o'clock he thought it probable they dined at three, and so on, for several hours; but at six, he felt certain they would not dine at all, and even if they should, he doubted whether he should be alive to partake of the repast. At seven, however, he welcomed the sound of a bell, and learnt it was the signal for dressing, upon which he hurried up stairs, and returning with much precipitation, after the lapse of five minutes, was surprised to find several of the an assertion which much amazed party not yet set out on the errand he had so speedily accomplished. At dinner he ate enormously of the first course, supposing it to be the only one, and called three times for beer. The forks puzzled him extremely, and he seemed wholly unable to determine which side should be kept uppermost, but he failed to apply them to their most important use, and employed his knife where its principal attribute of cutting was more than needless. His companions were shocked; nor was the subject so disgustingly stale to them, as to check the wit of Alexander, the eldest son, and deter him from inquiring, with great simplicity, whether he had seen the Indian Jugglers, and insidiously leading him to explain their method of thrusting knives down their throats. In the evening, the young ladies entertained him with Italian music, and would not believe he understood nothing of it. One asked his opinion of Rossini, and another was certain he liked Beethoven; but the greatest mirth was excited by his replying to a question respecting a song he held in his hand, that he could not tell its name, but it was from "Nozzy die Figaro, by Mozzart." Then he was entreated to sing himself, and with so much urgency, that he was obliged to yield; fortunately, he selected a comic subject, and though his auditors were too polite to laugh, he had no reason to be dissatisfied with the amusement they exhibited. He remarked that the song was in a play, and inquired if they had ever seen it performed. They replied in the negative; and fancying himself in one respect at least their superior, he began to relate how exquisitely he had seen it acted by a strolling company in his native town. They heard him gravely till he concluded, and then gave him to understand that they never frequented the theatres in London, and that, in fact, nobody ever did; him at first, since he had been informed they were often almost full; but they soon explained themselves more clearly, and abashed him by the conviction that he had introduced a subject of notorious vulgarity. A disquisition on the metropolis naturally ensued, and here, having never seen it, he felt himself in very deep shade, and, while they descanted on its charms, he was not a little galled by their commiseration of his ignorance. London seemed the very utopia of their imaginations-the concentration of all that was beautiful to the eye, and delightful to the intellect. It was the seat and source of all merit; other regions shone only by its reflected lustre; they esteemed Nature an architect inferior to Mr. Nash; and could the moon and stars have been "warranted townmade," they would have liked them better. Every succeeding day added to the humiliation Maurice already began to experience; and all the divisions of the day had their appropriate annoyances. If he walked out, he detested his boots or his gloves; if he rode, he inwardly cursed his breeches; and at dinner, he was so bothered by French names for the commonest dishes, that he was reduced to the phrases, "I'll trouble you," or, a little of that dish, if you please;" and if he was asked to take any particular wine, he gave a hurried assent, though, for aught he knew of its appellation, it might have been a solution of arsenic. "And who," he inquired, "were the persons that caused him this vexatious abasement?" Merely a London merchant, at one time not much richer than himself, content with a plain cypher on his seal, instead of the splendid coat of arms of horned dogs and winged pigs, which now figured on every signet and every possible article of furniture in the house, from the hall-chairs to the buckets used in the stableyard. One of his sons had been his school-fellow so far from being in any way his superior, he had ranked far beneath him in attainments, and was flogged once a week for never washing his face. The reflection on the change produced in their relative situations was of such constant and irritating recurrence, that the pleasure of his visit was wholly annihilated, and as soon as he conveniently could, he made some pretext for returning home. He resumed the duties of his business, but the smell of malt disgusted him. The workmen, whom he had once respected as industrious or clever servants, seemed to him perfect caricatures of humanity; and the huge tubs, which had excited his pride by their immensity, looked so insupportably hideous, that he almost wished they might burst. A country brewer!-that phrase comprised all that was odious. Had he been a London brewer, the case would have been completely changed, for then he might have had no more to do with brewing than with astrology, and, at the expense of having his name gibbeted in capitals all over the city, followed by the mysterious word Entire, he might have enjoyed an ample income, and sat, with booksellers and linendrapers, an ornament to the senate of his country. He concluded, therefore, that the principal difference in human conditions depended on living in, or out of, the metropolis; and he began to consider, whether it was not competent to him to attain all the advantages it could offer, and become, like Mr. James-James, the founder of a polite, wealthy, and ancient family. As the idea began to unfold itself, its attractions increased, and he ventured, at length, to communicate his views to Mr. Johnson, who called him a fool, and strove to convince him that he was one; but, failing in the argument, and hoping that love might have more influence than reason, he sent 25 ATHENEUM VOL. 5, 3d series. him on a visit to Miss Juliet Manning. All families have their distinctive foibles, and the reigning one of the Mannings was a pathetic love of brute pets. The sitting-room, into which Maurice was ushered, contained two old dogs and a puppy, a parrot, a cat without a tail, and a lamb; Juliet was nursing a kitten, and three of her brothers were in tears-William, because his last pigeon was just dead; and John and Thomas, because the tame hawk of the one had slain the tame mouse of the other. In short, it was impossible to walk across the room, much less to approach the fire, without breaking the tail or the leg of some antiquated favorite, and such an accident was certain to call forth so much tenderness of feeling, that the author of it wished he had only murdered all the family. The present spectacle was deeply interesting. Juliet looked pleased, and welcomed her lover but she could not rise without disturbing the kitten; her brothers sat bemoaning themselves with undiminished grief, and the dogs lay luxuriously on the hearth-rug. But shortly after the scene was wholly changed; the mourners leaped up and dried their tears; the kitten was laid aside in a little bed, and the dogs raised their unwieldy bodies upon their insufficient legs. Maurice did not at first comprehend the reason, but was speedily informed that Mr. Manning had just sounded a horn, to intimate that he was awaiting them at the pond to entertain their tender sensibilities with the diversion of a duck-hunt. He accompanied them, and witnessed the sport, which was highly satisfactory; the duck, indeed, died from exhaustion, but, as it was not a pet, its sufferings excited no commiseration, and its death no sorrow. In a happier frame of mind, Maurice would have excused the inconsistency and thoughtless cruelty which he witnessed, but he had begun to despise the actors in the scene, and therefore felt little tenderness for their failings. Juliet, in particular, he condemned with unmeasured severity, and contrasted the unbridled gaiety of her demeanor with the calm dignity of the ladies at Nutbridge-park, till he concluded that she was vulgar as well as silly, and combined illbreeding with a want of sensibility. As he had once erred in exalting her foibles to the rank of virtues, so he now did by exaggerating them to the dignity of crimes. Hundreds inagine themselves persons of refined taste or excellent morality, when they are, in fact, only ill-tempered: they feel contempt because they are bilious; and when they are overwhelmed with spleen, they dignify their ailments with the idea of conscious superiority, pity their friends, and write satires. Such, at least, was the foundation of the discontent of Maurice. He struggled to conceal the change in his sentiments, but was not so far successful as to avoid wounding the feelings of Juliet; for his attentions were less spontaneous than usual, and his thoughts so abstracted, that when, by way of experiment, she dropped her glove, she was compelled, half-weeping with mortification, to pick it up again with her own hand. He concluded his visit, little pleased with his friends, and far less with himself; and as he rode home, he wrought himself up to the resolution, that he would without delay seek his fortune in that El Dorado, which had raised so far above him persons whom he had once deemed little more than his equals. Mr. Johnson was a man who had no idea of arguing, and whether right or wrong, he always got into a passion; whence it arose, that the urgency of Maurice in pressing the execution of his plan-a plan, of which he saw the folly more clearly than he could explain it led to an inveterate quarrel. The relatives separated in disgust; and the younger one, with a hundred pounds in his pocket, and an imag nation overcharged with ideas of wealth and pleasure, set out on a cold evening in March for the metropolis. He found only one vacant space left for him on the exterior of the vehicle, and that considerably encroached upon by the persons and goods of others. Two men of extraordinary dimensions, wearing, each, twenty great coats, with as many score of capes, shared the seat, and opposite to him was the guard; the space destined for his feet was occupied by a hamper of fish, and two umbrellas had right of possession behind him but these evils were tolerable, when compared with the annoyance of a box so projecting from among the luggage, that it gave to his head one compulsory position, far from pleasing or perpendicular. The long dreariness of a wintry night lay in prospect before him; he could not sleep; and once when he attempted it, the sonorous bugle of the guard, covering his head, awoke him with a start; but it must not be disguised, that he had the satisfaction, not only of seeing and hearing that several of his companions were asleep, but of feeling the fact, by occasional buttings and oscillations, indicative of happy repose. At length morning broke on the white frosty fields in the neighborhood of the metropolis; and shortly after he was deposited in Gracechurch-street, with London all before him where to choose. The appearance of all he had hitherto seen of his terrestrial paradise rather surprised him. The buildings in Whitechapel did not strike him as more splendid than those of his native town, and the atmosphere, compounded of smoke, gas, and steam, seemed scarcely fluid. It had not rained for some time previously, yet everything was as wet as if the flood had just subsided: but this, though he knew it not, was an advantage to the prospect, for, otherwise, clouds of dust would have blinded him and prevented his seeing at all. Instead of remaining in the City, he proceeded, as he had been recommended, to the neighborhood of Covent Garden, which for its undisturbed quiet, and the sweet perfume of stale vegetables, is a very favorite region for hotels. Here he was ushered into a room, which exactly contained a bed, and after surrendering his boots to a man, who gave him in exchange a pair of slippers, which would have fitted a horse as well as a gentleman, he endeavored to procure a little rest. But, to say nothing of an "Introduction to Entomology," of which it would be improper to speak more particularly, the bed might have proved an excellent antidote to a pound of opium; and two persons, one whistling, and the other singing, were getting up in adjoining apartments. Accordingly, he soon rose again, and attempted to wash himself with water, of which the surface was covered with heaven-descended particles, answering the purpose of rouge, except that they were black, while the soap seemed intended, by its size, to exemplify the infinite divisibility of matter, and, by its unchanged endurance of moisture, proved itself a far better material for public buildings than the external plaster of the new treasury, so lately built to contain the national debt. Nor was it very easy to obtain any alleviation of his numerous afflictions, for, though a rope attached to a wire hung from the ceiling, he labored at it for a long period without success, and had no other reason to suppose he was ringing a bell, than that nobody came to answer it. When he had prevailed over all the difficulties of the toilette, and taken the meal naturally succeeding to it, his thoughts turned towards a subject of yet greater importance, the accomplishment of the first step in creating his own fortune. And here he was surprised to discover how indefinite his ideas had hitherto been, and how much they wanted of any approach to practical application. In this perplexity, he had recourse to the advice of a person slightly connected with him by descent, and was fortunate enough to procure a situation as clerk in a merchant's office. The salary, indeed, was exceedingly small, and the labor required bore to it the usual inverse ratio: but it was precisely the occupation he desired, as affording most room for the splendid results he anticipated. The ostensible head of the mercantile concern to which Maurice was recommended, was Mr. Merivale; but he committed all its cares to one or two accomplices, and took no active part, except that of spending much the largest share of the profits. There once existed a decided line of demarcation between commercial grandeur and the dignity of nobility and hereditary wealth; and the distinction, though founded in pride, and often invidious, was not wholly mischievous in its tendency. But, at the birth of Mr. Merivale, this boundary-line was fast fading away; and the city wall, weakened by the frequent irruptions of needy nobles, and excursive exploits of ambitious traders, was tottering to its foundation. In conformity with the prevailing idea, that a merchant not only might be, but ought to be, a gentleman, the father of Mr. Merivale sent him to the university, and eccated him, in all respects, as a man of hereditary and independent fortune. The natural consequence was, that, at three-and-twenty, he felt no predilection for the city; was irregular in his attendance at his office, and careless in his transactions; and in process of time, after the death of his father, surrendered the whole management of his affairs to partners and clerks. Thenceforth he regarded his merchandise in no other light than as a disgraceful source of profit-the secret profession of a thief, of which |