ENGRAVED BY E. HACKER, FROM A PAINTING BY R. ANsdell. Holloa, Mr. Gillie ?--what means this fierce look ? I say, sir, come just have a care! But your business, may-be, no intrusion can brook, Hardish words, hardly spoken, when put with a frown, And yet how they alter, as altered the tone, "Tis "somebody's" footstep-who else could it be?- While you, silly dog, bouncing up to the door, How ready that challenge, how much to be feared, When flying from Scylla, Charybdis appeared- Poor Bunny! so cosily sitting below, When, hark! what is that coming here? Those little red eyes, that so curiously glowGood gracious!-what is it? "Who's there?" On quicker he comes, that long stealthy run 'Tis so with us all; from the scenes of our love Oh! may some kinder spirit sit watching above, 15 THE UNSUCCESSFUL MAN; OR, PASSAGES IN THE LIFE OF TILBURY NOGO, ESQ. BY FOXGLOVE. CHAP. XXVII. "Let me not live,' quoth he, After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL. "Farewell! with him alone may rest the pain, If such there were-with you, the moral of his strain." CHILDE HAROLD. Life is a strange medley! As I sit here in lonely grandeur-the sole inhabitant of that great desert which constitutes the principal dining-room of the "Munchausen Club," I can scarce believe that the middle-aged member, whose bristling whiskers and incipient crow's-feet I can too plainly discern in yonder unflattering mirror, is the same Tilbury Nogo who, but a few short years before, bounded up the steps of this exclusive caravanserie with all the buoyant elasticity of youth, and swaggered through its halls, in the pleasing consciousness that "the world was all before him, where to choose." The very waiter seems to glance incredulously at the country-made boots and ill-fitting attire of a gentleman, whom, it argues now no vanity to say, he remembers once the most particular in his "chaussure," the most scrupulously correct in his attire. Well may he look as much astonished as a waiter is capable of looking-for these functionaries, like the chairs and tables with which they are chiefly associated, never grow old. For them the spring-tide and winter of life are not. Who ever recollects to have seen a waiter either in the bloom of youth or the decrepitude of old age? If he should be short-winded and gouty, your father remembers him afflicted with these inconveniences when he himself was a young man, If he is light, wiry, and active-light, wiry, and active he will remain, when you are tottering upon crutches, or writhing on a water-bed. Leave England to seek your fortune at the antipodes ; pursue your search after the fleeting jade from pole to pole; and when half a lifetime has elapsed, return to London, bankrupt at least in health and constitution, and so altered as not to be recognized by the very cousin with whom you have been brought up from a boy; walk into that C |