ing in the wind; the external gaiety giving the character of an appalling antithesis to the painful silence, immovable attitudes, and spellbound looks of the care-worn figures within. One man, a German, was contending against a run of ill-luck with a dogged obstinacy that was obviously making deep inroads upon his purse and his peace; for though his face was invisible from being bent over his perforated card, the drops of perspiration standing upon his forehead betrayed the inward agitation. All the losers were struggling to suppress emotions which still revealed themselves by the working of some disobedient muscle, the compression of the lips, the sardonic grin, or the glaring wrath of the eye; while the winners belied their assumed indifference by flushed cheeks and an expression of anxious triumph. Two or three forlorn operators, who had been cleaned out, as the phrase is, and condemned to idleness, were eying their more fortunate neighbours with a leer of malignant envy; while the bankers and their assistants, in the certainty of their profitable trade, exhibited a calm and watchful cunning, though their features, pale and sodden, betrayed the effect of confinement, heated rooms, and midnight vigils. E- informed me that the frequenters of these houses were authorized to call for refreshments of any description, but no one availed himself of the privilege; the "auri sacra fames," the pervading appetite of the place, had swallowed up every other. The very thought revolted me. What! eat and drink in this arena of the hateful passions; in this fatal room, from which many a suicide has rushed out to grasp the self-destroying pistol, or plunge into the darkness of the wave! in this room, which is denounced to Heaven by the widow's tears and the orphan's maledictions! Revolving these thoughts in my mind, I surveyed once more the faces before me, and could not help exclaiming-What a hideous study of human nature! "As we have employed so much time," said E- "in taking the latitude, or rather the longitude of these various phizzes, we shall be expected to venture something: I will throw down a napoleon, as a sop to Cerberus, and will then convoy you home."-"Nay," replied I, "it was for my instruction we came hither; the lesson I have received is well worth the money, so put down this piece of gold and let us begone."-"Let us at least wait till we have lost it," he resumed; "and in the meantime we will take our places at the table." I felt that I blushed as I sat down, and was about to deposit my offering hap-hazard, when my companion stopped my hand, and, borrowing a perforated card, bade me remark, that the red and black had zigzagged, or won alternately for fourteen times; and that there had subsequently been a long run upon the black, which would now probably cross over to the other colour; from all which premises he deduced that I should venture upon the red: which I accordingly did. Sir Balaam's devil, who "now tempts by making rich, not making poor," was, I verily believe, hovering over my devoted head at that instant; my deposit was doubled, and I was preparing to decamp with my two naps, when my adviser insisted upon my not baulking my luck, as there would probably be a run upon the red, and I suffered my stake to remain, and go on doubling until I had won ten or twelve times in succession. "Now," cried E—, “I should advise you to pocket the affront, and be satisfied." Adopting his counsel, I could hardly believe his assertion, or my own eyes, when he handed me over bank-notes to the amount of twenty thousand francs, observing that I had made a tolerably successful début for a beginner. Returning home in some perturbation and astonishment of mind, I resolved to prepare a little surprise for my wife; and spreading the bank-notes upon the table with as much display as possible, I told her, upon her entering the room, how I had won them; and inquiring whether Aladdin with his wonderful lamp could have spent two or three hours more profitably, I stated my intention of appropriating a portion of it to her use in the purchase of a handsome birth-day present. In a moment the blood rushed to her face, and as quickly receded, leaving it of an ashy paleness, when she spurned the notes from her, exclaiming with a solemn terror-"I would as soon touch the forty pieces of silver for which Judas betrayed his Master." Her penetrating head instantly saw the danger to which I had exposed myself, and her fond heart as quickly gave the alarm to her feelings; but in a few seconds she threw her arms around me, and ejaculated, as the tears ran down her cheek"Forgive me, my dear Charles, pardon my vehemence, my ingratitude; I have a present to ask, a boon to implore-promise that you will grant it me."-"Most willingly," I rejoined, "if it be in my power."—"Give me then your pledge, never to play again.”— "Cheerfully," continued I, for I had already formed that resolution. She kissed me with many affectionate thanks, adding that I had made her completely happy. I believe it, for at that moment I felt so myself. ROUGE-ET-NOIR. mediate station, which should surpass the Weak and wicked reveries! a single turn of Many men who are candid and upright in | arguing with others, are the most faithless and jesuitical of casuists in chopping logic with themselves. Let no one trust his head in a contest with the heart; the former, suppressing or perverting whatever is disagreeable to the latter, will assume a demure and sincere conviction, while it has all along been playing booty, and furnishing weapons to its adversary. The will must be honest if we wish the judgment to be so. A tormenting itch for following up my good luck, as I termed it, set me upon devising excuses for violating my pledge to my wife, and no shuffling or quibbling was I had protoo contemptible for my purpose. mised never to play again-"at that house," or if I had not actually said so, I meant to say so: there could be no forfeiture of my word, Miserable therefore, if I went to another. sophistry! yet, wretched as it was, it satisfied -so easily is a my conscience for the moment, weak man deluded into criminal indulgence. Fortified with such valid arguments, I made my début at the Salon des Etrangers, and after a two hours' sitting, had the singular good luck to return home a winner of nearly as much as I had gained on the first day. Success for once made me moderate; in the humility of my prosperous play, I resolved only to continue till I had won ten thousand pounds, when I would communicate my adventures to my wife with a solemn abjuration of the pursuit in future; and as I considered myself in possession of the certain secret of winning whatever I pleased, I took credit to myself for my exFrom Frascati, the scene treme moderation. of my third attempt, by a lucky, or rather unlucky fatality, which my subsequent experience only renders the more wonderful, I retired with a sum exceeding the whole of my previous profits, when, like the tiger who is rendered insatiate by the taste of blood, I instantly became ravenous for larger riches; and already repenting the paltry limitation of the day before, determined on proceeding until I had Another day's luck, and doubled its amount. Madame Deshoulieres says very truly, that even this would have been spurned, for neither Johnson's Sir Epicure Mammon, nor Mas- gamesters begin by being dupes and end by singer's Luke, nor Pope's Sir Balaam, under- being knaves; and I am about to confirm it by went a more rapid development of the latent an avowal to which nothing should have imdevils of ambition. Indistinct visions of gran-pelled me but the hope of deterring others by deur floated before my eyes; my senses already seemed to be steeped in a vague magnificence; and after hesitating, in a sort of waking dream, between Wanstead House and Fonthill, one of which I held to be too near, and the other too distant from London, I dwelt complacently on the idea of building a mansion at some inter an exposure of my own delinquency. A female relation had remitted me seven hundred pounds to purchase into the French funds, with which sum in my pocket I unfortunately called at the Salon des Etrangers in my way to the stockbroker's, and my evil genius suggesting to me that there was a glorious opportunity of re I am aware that I abused their assistance, and wore out their patience; but I never anticipated the horror to which the exhaustion of my own means, and the inability to extort more from others, would reduce me. The anguish of my losses, the misery of my degradation, the agony of mind with which I reflected upon my impoverished wife and family, were nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the racking torment of being compelled to refrain from gambling. It sounds incredible, but it is strictly true. To sit at the table with empty pockets and to see others playing, was absolutely insupportable. I envied even the heaviest losers covering my heavy losses, I snatched the notes | I have not forgotten their kindnesses. from my pocket, threw them on the table just before the dealer began—and lost! Stunned by the blow, I went home in a state of calm despair, communicated the whole to my wife in as few words as possible, and ended by declaring that she was a beggar, and her husband disgraced for ever. "Not yet, my dear Charles," replied the generous woman, her eyes beaming with an affectionate forgiveness,-"not yet; we may still exclaim with the French king after the battle of Pavia, We have lost everything but our honour; and while we retain that, our losses are but as a grain of sand. We may be depressed by fortune, but we can only be disgraced by ourselves. As to this seven could I have found an antagonist, I would hundred pounds-take my jewels-they will have gambled for an eye, an arm, a leg, for sell for more than is required; and if our pre-life itself. A thousand devils seemed to be sent misfortunes induce you to fly from Paris, gnawing at my heart-L believed I was mad— and abandon this fatal pursuit, they will as- I even hope I was. suredly become the greatest blessings of our life." No reproach ever passed her lips, or lingered in her eye; nor did I fail to observe the delicacy which, mingling up her own fate with mine, strove to soothe my feelings, by disguising my individual guilt under the cloak of a joint misfortune. Noble-minded woman! Mezentius himself could not have devised a more cruel fate than to tie thee to a soul so dead to shame, and so defunct in gratitude as mine! Will not the reader loathe and detest me, even worse than I do myself, when I inform him, that in return for all this magnanimity I had the detestable baseness to linger in Paris, to haunt the gaming-table, to venture the wretched drainings of my purse in the silver room, to become an habitual borrower of paltry sums under pledges of repayment which I knew I had not the means of redeeming, and to submit tamely to the indignity of palpable cuts from my acquaintance in the public streets? From frequently encountering at the saloons, I had formed a slight friendship with Lord T Lord F- Sir G- WColonel T and particularly with poor S- -t, before he had consummated the ruin of his fine fortune, and debilitated his frame by paralysis brought on by anxiety; and I was upon terms of intimacy with others of my countrymen, who with various success, but much more ample means than myself, were making offerings to the demon of Rouge-et-Noir. Should this brief memoir fall beneath the eye of any of my quondam friends, they may not impossibly derive benefit from its perusal: at all events, they may be pleased to know that : Yes I have tasked myself to detail my moral degradation and utter prostration of character, with a fidelity worthy of Rousseau himself, and I feel it a duty not to shrink from my complete exposure. After a night passed in the state of mind I have been describing, in one of those haunts which I was justly entitled to denominate a hell, I wandered out at daybreak towards the Pont de Jena, as if I could cool my parched lips and burning brain by the heavy shower that was then falling. As the dripping rustics passed me on their market-horses, singing and whistling, their happiness, seeming to be a mockery of my wretchedness, filled me with a malignant rage. By the time I had reached the bridge the rain had ceased, the rising sun, glancing upon the river, threw a bloom over the woods in the direction of Sevres and St. Cloud, and the birds were piping in the air. Ever a passionate admirer of Nature, her charms stole me for a moment from myself, but presently my thoughts reverting from the heaven without to the hell within, I gnashed my teeth, and fell back into a double bitterness and despair of soul. I have always been a believer in sudden and irresistible impulses; an idea which will not appear ridiculous to those who are conversant with the records of crime. A portrait of Sarah Malcolm the murderess, which I had seen many years ago in the possession of Lord Mulgrave, leading me to the perusal of her trial and execution in the Newgate Calendar, induced me to give perfect credit to the averment, that the idea of the crime came suddenly into her head without the least solicitation, and that she felt driven forward to its accomplish ment by some invisible power. Similar declarations from many other offenders offer abundant confirmation of the same fact; and it will be in the recollection of many, that the murderer of Mrs. Bonar at Chiselhurst repeatedly declared that he had never dreamed of the enormity ten minutes before its commission, but that the thought suddenly rushed into his mind, and pushed him forward to the bloody deed. Many people cannot look over a precipice without feeling tempted to throw themselves down; I know a most affectionate father who never approaches a window with his infant child without being haunted by solicitations to cast it into the street; and a gentleman of unimpeachable honour, who if he happens, in walking the highway, to вее a note-case or handkerchief emerging from a passenger's pocket, is obliged to stop short or cross over the way, so vehemently does he feel impelled to withdraw them. These " toys of desperation," generated in the giddiness of the mind at the bare imagination of any horror, drive it to commit the reality as a relief from the fearful vision, upon the same principle that delinquents voluntarily deliver themselves up to justice, because death itself is less intolerable than the fear of it. Let it not be imagined that I am seeking to screen any of these unhappy men from the consequences of their hallucination; I am merely asserting a singular property of the mind, of which I myself am about to record a frightful confirmation. Standing on the bridge, and turning away my looks from the landscape in that despair of heart which I have described, my downcast eyes fell upon the waters gliding placidly beneath me. They seemed to invite me to quench the burning fire with which I was consumed; the river whispered to me with a distinct utterance that peace and oblivion were to be found in its Lethean bed :—every muscle of my body was animated by an instant and insuperable impulse; and within half a minute from its first maddening sensation, I had climbed over the parapet, and plunged headlong into the water!-The gushing of waves in my ears, and the rapid flashing of innumerable lights before my eyes, are the last impressions I recollect. Into the circumstances of my preservation I never had the heart to inquire: when consciousness revisited me, I found myself lying upon my own bed with my wife weeping beside me, though she instantly assumed a cheerful look, and told me that I had met with a dreadful accident, having fallen into the river when leaning over to examine some object beneath. That she knows the whole truth I am perfectly convinced, but we scrupulously avoid the subject, by an understood, though unexpressed compact. It is added in her mind to the long catalogue of my offences, never to be alluded to, and, alas! never to be forgotten. She left my bedside for a moment to return with my children, who rushed up to me with a cry of joy; and as they contended for the first kiss, and inquired after my health with glistening eyes, the cruelty, the atrocity of my cowardly attempt struck with a withering remorse upon my heart. ON THE INSTABILITIE OF YOUTH. [Thomas, second Lord Vaux, died about 1560. All that is known of his life is that he attended Cardinal Wolsey on his embassy to Francis I., received the order of the Bath at the coronation of Anne Boleyn, and was sometime captain of the island of Jersey. His principal pieces are found in the Paradise of Dayntie Devises, 1576; and one of his songs was used by Shakspeare for the gravedigger in Hamlet, act v. scene 1.] When I look back, and in myself behold Thou, that by power to life didst raise the dead, 1 "In state to starve"-About to perish. sent. LONDON. The position of London, relatively to the other towns of the empire, was, in the time of Charles the Second, far higher than at preFor at present the population of London is little more than six times the population of Manchester or of Liverpool. In the days of Charles the Second the population of London was more than seventeen times the population of Bristol or of Norwich. It may be doubted whether any other instance can be mentioned of a great kingdom in which the first city was more than seventeen times as large as the second. There is reason to believe that, in 1685, London had been, during about half a century, the most populous capital in Europe. The inhabitants, who are now at least nineteen hundred thousand, were then probably little more than half a million. London had in the world only one commercial rival, now long ago outstripped, the mighty and opulent Amsterdam. English writers boasted of the forest of masts and yardarms which covered the river from the Bridge to the Tower, and of the stupendous sums which were collected at the Custom House in Thames Street. There is, indeed, no doubt that the trade of the metropolis then bore a far greater proportion than at present to the whole trade of the country; yet to our generation the honest vaunting of our ancestors must appear almost ludicrous. The shipping which they thought incredibly great appears not to have exceeded seventy thousand tons. This was, indeed, then more than a third of the whole tonnage of the kingdom, but is now less than a fourth of the tonnage of Newcastle, and is nearly equalled by the tonnage of the steam vessels of the Thames. The customs of London amounted, in 1685, to about three hundred and thirty thousand pounds a year. In our time, the net duty paid annually, at the same place, exceeds ten millions. Whoever examines the maps of London which were published towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second will see that only the nucleus of the present capital then existed. The town did not, as now, fade by imperceptible degrees into the country. No long avenues of villas, embowered in lilacs and laburnums, extended from the great centre of wealth and civilisation almost to the boundaries of Middlesex and far into the heart of Kent and Surrey. In the east, no part of the immense line of warehouses and artificial lakes which now stretches from the Tower to Blackwall had even been projected. On the west, scarcely one of those stately piles of building which are inhabited by the noble and wealthy was in existence; and Chelsea, which is now peopled by more than forty thousand human beings, was a quiet country village with about a thousand inhabitants. On the north, cattle fed, and sportsmen wandered with dogs and guns, over the site of the borough of Marylebone, and over far the greater part of the space now covered by the boroughs of Finsbury and of the Tower Hamlets. Islington was almost a solitude, and poets loved to contrast its silence and repose with the din and turmoil of the monster London. On the south the capital is now connected with its suburb by several bridges, not inferior in magnificence and solidity to the noblest works of the Cæsars. In 1685, a single line of irregular arches, overhung by piles of mean and crazy houses, and garnished, after a fashion worthy of the naked barbarians of Dahomy, with scores of mouldering heads, impeded the navigation of the river. Of the metropolis, the City, properly socalled, was the most important division. At the time of the Restoration it had been built, for the most part, of wood and plaster; the few bricks that were used were ill baked; the booths where goods were exposed to sale projected far into the streets, and were overhung by the upper stories. A few specimens of this architecture may still be seen in those districts which were not reached by the great fire. That fire had, in a few days, covered a space of little less than a square mile with the ruins of eighty-nine churches and of thirteen thousand houses. But the City had risen again with a celerity which had excited the admiration of neighbouring countries. Unfortunately, the old lines of the streets had been to a great extent preserved; and those lines, originally traced in an age when even princesses performed their journeys on horseback, were often too narrow to allow wheeled carriages to pass each other with ease, and were therefore ill adapted for the residence of wealthy persons in an age when a coach and six was a fashionable luxury. The style of building was, however, far superior to that of the City which had perished. The ordinary material was brick, of much better quality than had formerly been used. On the sites of the ancient parish churches had arisen a multitude of new domes, towers, and spires which bore the mark of the fertile genius of Wren. In every place save one the traces of the great devastation had been completely *This was written in 1842; the population of London effaced. But the crowds of workmen, the is now in 1888 over four millions -ED. scaffolds, and the masses of hewn stone were |
