It
was distributing poetical justice in perfection.
I now entered London _en cavalier_, and became a blood upon town. I
took fashionable lodgings in the West End; employed the first tailor;
frequented the regular lounges; gambled a little; lost my money
good-humoredly, and gained a number of fashionable good-for-nothing
acquaintances. Had I had more industry and ambition in my nature, I
might have worked my way to the very height of fashion, as I saw many
laborious gentlemen doing around me. But it is a toilsome, an anxious,
and an unhappy life; there are few beings so sleepless and miserable as
your cultivators of fashionable smiles.
I was quite content with that kind of society which forms the frontiers
of fashion, and may be easily taken possession of. I found it a light,
easy, productive soil. I had but to go about and sow visiting cards,
and I reaped a whole harvest of invitations. Indeed, my figure and
address were by no means against me. It was whispered, too, among the
young ladies, that I was prodigiously clever, and wrote poetry; and the
old ladies had ascertained that I was a young gentleman of good family,
handsome fortune, and "great expectations."
I now was carried away by the hurry of gay life, so intoxicating to a
young man; and which a man of poetical temperament enjoys so highly on
his first tasting of it. That rapid variety of sensations; that whirl
of brilliant objects; that succession of pungent pleasures.
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