turned back over his coat cuffs, drove a high-stepping horse in an admirably-hung dark-green cabriolet; when the bystanders would turn from Louis Napoleon (then merely regarded as a stupid, silent, disagreeable exile), to gaze with wonder on Lord Cantilupe lounging along his horse's back; when a whisper would pass round among the strangers that the red-faced, merry-looking gentleman in the dark-blue cab was Lord Dolly Fitzclarence, while his friend and charioteer was his invariable companion, Sir George Wombwell; that the tall man in spectacles, on the stout cob, was Thackeray, a writer in "Punch "; and that the gigantic man with the handsome face and the keen eye was Jacob Omnium, who had just exposed the abuses of the Palace Court. Then crowds used to

assemble round Apsley House to witness the mounting and dismounting of the great Duke of Wellington, and to receive the forefinger salutation of the blue-coated, white-trousered veteran, and to cheer the Queen and Prince Albert, who drove constantly in the Park. Hey, presto! a pull of the string, a shake of the kaleidoscope and here in 1867, all is changed! Lady Blessington, D'Orsay, Lord Cantilupe, Lord Dolly Fitzclarence, Sir George Wombwell, Thackeray, "the Dook," and Prince Albert, are dead; the Queen never shows herself to her subjects, and a new generation has arisen which lounges, and yawps, and smokes, and buffoons, and haw-haws in the place where better men have been before them.

In the Season, chez Lady Leighton Buzzard. Who is Lady Leighton Buzzard? My dear fellow, you don't know? Woman who has had the most extraordinary life. Ask Jack Hawkes, he can tell you all about her. Was the daughter of an Irish Captain of Militia, sir, who came to grief and took to drinking; this girl, Olivia, went upon the stage, danced-by Jove, danced-at the Crow Street Theatre, and was devilish pretty, and all that kind of thing, and made a conquest of old Blennerhassett, the banker, who married her, and two years after died, leaving her all his enormous fortune. Then she came over to England, married Sir Leighton Buzzard, who was a Tory Baronet, and who killed himself with too much political excitement and brandyand-water; and since then she has remained a handsome widow, a leader of ton, and one of the most noticeable personages of the day. In the season she entertains regularly, and always has the best people. On this Saturday night, H.R.H. the Duke of Brentford has been the guest-portly, pleasant, bland, and affable; not too much to say for himself, limiting his conversation principally to clearing his throat,

with a "Hum! ha! ex-actly!" Also the Baratarian Ambassador, short, stout, and close-cropped; the Corsican Ambassador, long, thin, and diplomatic; the Turkish Ambassador, in his dark dress and fez cap, looking like a bottle of wine with a red seal; Viscount Talkington, a moody man, with a face like a sheep; Viscountess Talkington, a crushed woman with a chronic cold; Mr. Justice Minos, the great lawyer, a man with a keen eye and a face like a fox; Lady Wuffington, Lady Potiphar, and Baroness Guimauve, rival beauties; Baby Blackwood, of the Fusiliers; Dr. J. Miller, buffoon-in-ordinary to Belgravia; Mr. Eliab Norris, M.P., the full-flavoured wit of the House of Commons; and Mr. Nox, the editor of the "Thunderbolt." The dinner has been good, but dull to all save the last-mentioned gentlemen, who sat side by side and had their own jokes, and "afterwards her ladyship had a reception, which was attended by a numerous and distinguished assemblage." So says the reporter of the fashionable journal, and surely he must know far better than this bashful philosopher, who yet recognized some great personages among them. First the Duke and Duchess of Fitzfulke, his Grace in a wig the fit of which would have excited admiration in Mr. Truefitt, and her Grace as radiant and handsome as ever; Mabel, Marchioness of Macclesfield, looking like a vignette from a "Keepsake " of 1830; Lady Millicent Greatheart, and Scipio Tallboys, A.R.A., latest tame-cat-in-waiting; the Countess of Pillowton and the Lady Eider Down; Feldzeugmeister Von Bopps; M. Le Comte de Carambole; Sir Hercules Ajax, K.C.B., very old and shaky; the Bishop of Boston, so bland, and innocent, and child-like in his manner, with a crumpled face that seemed to long for a mob-cap to set it off, except in the moment when Sir H. Ajax, K.C.B., trod on the episcopal corns, when the crumpled face assumed a very different expression. The Macnab, of Macnab; Mr. Banshee O'Buster, M.P. for Balydoolan; Ellenbogen the German fiddler; Churchyard the sensation novelist; scores of trembling, blushing youths from the Household Brigade; scores of simpering Misses from the wife-market; much crowding and pushing, and grasping at dabs of muddy ice and cups of thick coffee; much tootle-tootle of Ellenbogen the fiddler, and Klavierspieler the pianist, dimly heard through oceans of talk; much private joke between Eliab Norris, M.P., and Nox of the "Thunderbolt "; much confusion in the getting-up of carriages; much waiting in the hall, interspersed with chaff from Lady Lesbia Longfort, whose style of calembourg is-well, never mind! and very soon after midnight-let us be orthodox or die !-Lady Leighton Buzzard's reception is at an end.

In the Season at Greenwich (how, by the way, has Blackwall slipped out of the list of pleasant dining places? has the satisfactory name of Lovegrove faded out of the land; and what has become of the Brunswick" and the "Artichoke," those famous hostelries ?) In the season at Greenwich, warm evening, half a score of carriages, drags, flies, broughams, phaetons, and old family coaches, from which the horses have been removed, are standing outside the "Trafalgar." A large, stout person (they always were large, stout persons! Poor Mr. Hart is dead, and rich Mr. Quartermaine has retired!—both were large and stout-the successors of both, who do the honours of the doorway, are of similar pattern) receives us with bows, and on our mentioning the name of our host, shouts "Dolphin!" Away we go upstairs, and in a few minutes sit down to such a dinner as is unmatchable in Europe. I don't say that there may not be better. At Philippe's, in the Rue Montorgueil, they used to give a far more perfect dinner (readers will perceive that there is a gentle strain of middle-age running throughout this paper), and I understand that now you can dine sumptuously at Durand's. But the Greenwich dinner is a specialty-what, it is impossible to define. Not the whitebait, for that you can get quite as fresh and better cooked at many clubs and private houses; not the wine for that is seldom worth mentioning; not the brown bread and butter, but a general glamour of eating and drinking--the open windows, the "waters where we watch the stately ships," i.e., the Rotterdam and Margate steamers, the colliers, the Woolwich boats dodging in and out, and the two or three four-oars, so different from the up-stream craft the big blocks of what is supposed to be Wenham, but what in reality is Norway ice, bound with pretty greenery, in the middle of the table; and, above all, the general notion that you are "dining at Greenwich," and out for a holiday! A full night, to-night, at the "Trafalgar." Those stentorian shouts of applause, mingled with the sound of tables loudly knocked, came from the "Bellerophon" room, where the Worshipful Company of Leather-Breeches Makers are holding their annual dinner. Glorious old fellows, the leatherbreeches makers, for the most part old boys of the old school, with red faces, and high starched cravats, and white waistcoats, with an undimmed love for port wine, and a notion of taking a good deal of it. Old Buckskin, the father of the Company, now over eighty years of age, sits on the right hand of the chairman, and returns thanks in a piping treble for the great toast-"The Leather-Breeches Makers'

Company, root and branch, may it flourish for ever!" Then Jack Flokes, the "wild dog" of the Company, ætat 62, sings a song, in which there is a good deal about a certain "Phillis," who "rifles hearts," and a more than passing reference to "ruby lips" and "beaming eyes"; and at its conclusion all the old boys poke each other in the ribs, and it is publicly asserted that a lady with fair hair, standing in one of the balconies below, was observed to stare very hard at Jack Flokes as they came in to dinner; and there is more laughing, and more drinking, and a good deal of smoking, and finally the Leather-Breeches Makers return to town by the last train, in a convivial, not to say vinous, state. In the "Dreadnought," the room immediately above this, the staff of the "Scourge," the well-known weekly journal of "politics, literature, and society," are dining with the proprietors, two fat well-to-do men, who like literature when it pays, and know nothing further about it. All the go-between business between them and their contributors is done by Mr. Makeweight, the bald-headed, pleasant man at the head of the table, who "keeps things going" so admirably. Next to him is the Rev. Cyril Fleem, curate of St. Botolph the Martyr, in the City, who ekes out his clerical income by flaying rising novelists. Then Mr. Angostura, who looks after the bench and the bar, corrects the decisions of Lord ChiefJustices, and has never yet been trusted by attorneys with a brief. The stout, slouching man, in the rusty clerical garb, is the great sporting authority; and the jolly, grazier-looking young fellow looks after art and artists. All the biters of files are present, and the dinner is a very jolly one to all, save those who give it-the proprietors of the "Scourge," who, despite of Mr. Makeweight's jockeyship, cannot be made to fit in with anyone. No time now to speak of the "Victory," where young Lord Stampfoot is celebrating his Derby winnings by entertaining a select company; of the "Clarence," where Bloss (Milker and Bloss, Gutter Lane, Cheapside, artificial flower-makers) is entertaining the New York representative of his firm; of the coffee-room, where at some tables there are solitary diners-men with vast waistcoats, bulbous noses, shaky hands, and pendulous lips, quiet, self-contented gourmands; and where at others long moustaches are bending so far forward as to be touching crimped tresses, and bushy beards are brushing pearly shoulders.

What an immense amount of life, waiters at the "Trafalgar " must see "in the season!"

English Stabilities.

BY THE REV. C. W. DENISON,

Late United States Consul for British Guiana.

Ir was the oft-repeated wish of Washington Irving that he might be made happy by finding something finished. The expression of this wish of the great American author was not confined to his own country. He applied it to all lands in which he had travelled. In all countries that are commonly designated as new, where civilization and industry are making progress, it is quite obvious that many outward changes should take place. There must necessarily be the temporary scaffolding where the building is going up. Hence the East of America is constantly moving to the West; and, more recently, for good and sufficient reasons, the North to the South. It ought reasonably to be expected that such a march of empire would more or less encumber the pathway. The clearing of forests, the laying out of roads, the digging of canals, the bridging of rivers, the tunnelling of mountains, the filling up of valleys, is all so much preparatory work, contingent on building the foundations and rearing the superstructure of the Republic. It was necessary for the public good that the green hill-sides of Washington Irving's woodland home on the banks of the Hudson should yield a passage to the advancing trains of commerce, and that its quiet glens should echo to the whistle of the locomotive. When that public work was done, and well done, when the teeming millions of people bound to the West poured through a portion of his grounds, when merchandise from every quarter of the commercial world followed thundering after them, it was seen and felt that something was finished in which the people took a deep personal interest. Their industrious progress is the initiative of permanence. As the scaffolding disappears the proportions of the building are brought to light. At once it is perceived that the intention of the builders is to erect for coming ages. No broader or stronger foundations were ever laid than those of America are intended to be. Comparatively but few opportunities have been afforded Americans to show the stability of their structures. What could two centuries be expected to establish, in an isolated country, in comparison with thousands of ages in a neighbourhood of nations? As far as America has been able to turn her attention from a wilderness, from savages, from foreign and domestic wars, from the necessity of a provision for her daily bread, she has done what she