relaxation from toil. I doubt very much if I could hit a ball now, and as at my age it is inglorious to be beaten, I have long since given it up altogether, content to repose on the laurels of my youth; but, at the time I am speaking of, I was passionately fond of the game. The marker was a little shrivelled-up, prematurely-aged creature, with a malignant, cunning, leering countenance, expressive of every odious quality; an abortion, in short, who had only come into the world by mistake. Though a magnificent player, his style of play was as grotesque, uncouth, and puny as his person. The violent antipathy with which this misshapen libel on humanity inspired me, was probably as ill-grounded and unjust, as my prepossession in favour of two frequenters of the room whose ingenuous friendship seemed to emulate the fabled self-negation of Nisus and Euryalus. Their intimacy was the more extraordinary through the apparent dissimilarity between the two men. Nisus was a stout middle-sized man, of rubicund visage, beaming with good-nature and joviality. The snow-white wristbands drawn down to the top of his knuckles; the high-rolled velvet collar encircling a large expanse of shirt-frill, in the centre of which sparkled a magnificent diamond brooch; and the enormous bunch of seals and trinkets depending from his fob, appeared to my unsophisticated vision to be the outward signs of a prosperous Boniface, with an ill-regulated taste for dress and jewellery. In striking contrast was the gentlemanly, albeit threadbare, attire of Euryalus; nor less so his tall, spare figure, and care-worn, intellectual countenance. A high-bred gentleman, thought I, whom the fickle goddess has cruelly maltreated.
If I had seen these men with the eyes of my old age, would my opinion have been the same? Perhaps the grotesque marker would have excited more pity than aversion. The jovial Boniface might have been metamorphosed into a vulgar, over-dressed, and not over-scrupulous moneylender; and in the pale, haggard features of his Pythias, I should probably have traced the impress of long years of profligacy.
A circumstance that occurred about this time connected with the firm in which I was engaged, caused me to lose sight of these men; and, for a time, to forget their existence. A merchant in the Levant, with whom we had extensive business relations, failed, and I was selected to proceed thither, and save what I could out of the wreck. I was absent three years. When I returned to London the whole town was in the greatest state of excitement about the murder of Mr. Ware. A day or so afterwards I repaired to my old haunt near Lombard Street. There was a new marker in the billiard-room.
“What has become,” I inquired, “of the one who was here three years ago?”
“He hung himself,” was the reply.
“And the two gentlemen who were in the habit of playing here so constantly,” said I, describing them. “Do they still come as usual?”
“Dear me! sir! Did you not know? Why the tall one was Mr. Thurtell; and the short, stout gentleman, Mr. Ware.”
ROYAL ESPOUSALS.
Ninety years ago, the people of England, from the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury down to the ploughboy and scullion maid, had their heads as full of royal marriages as ours can be to-day. It was the year (1772) of the strongest national excitement about royal marriage that had been known in England since the days of the Tudors. King George III. had known what it was to love, and to be crossed in love by the vigilance of the guardians of royal youth. He had been deeply smitten by the charms of Lady Sarah Lennox, afterwards the mother of the knightly group of Napiers: but his disappointment in being forbidden to prosecute his suit did not soften his heart towards his brothers, but rather caused a reaction of temper, as if he was bent upon not allowing other princes the freedom of which he had been deprived. This reaction carried him further still; and he obtained from Parliament powers which should never have been granted, and should have been long ago abolished.
He was then five-and-thirty, and had half-a-dozen children; so that there was no danger about the succession; yet he required that his brothers, long ago marriageable, should please him in their choice of wives, before thinking of themselves. The Duke of Cumberland had married Mrs. Horton, a daughter of Lord Carhampton, and the Duke of Gloucester was known to have been for several years the husband of Lady Waldegrave, the daughter of Sir Edward Walpole, and to have two daughters living. The Queen’s German passion for immaculate royal quarterings had a good deal to do with the King’s passionate pursuit of his object. His strong self-will was roused; and in 1772 he required of Parliament the passage of a Bill which is the disgrace of our statute-book at this day. Lords Camden and Rockingham, Burke, and most of the chief statesmen of the day opposed it with their whole force; but the Bill was carried with a high hand.
I have just been reading (in the “Annual Register” for the year 1772) the Protests of nine of the peers in one group, and six in another; and it certainly seems to me that those Protests should be studied from generation to generation till the Royal Marriage Act is repealed. The two chief grounds of protest were that the Act violates the great laws of Nature, in the first place, and constitutional principle in the next. It was called from the beginning an “Act for the Encouragement of Royal Vice and Immorality;” and there was no less objection to the unconstitutional powers which it gave to the Sovereign first, and to Parliament afterwards, by which the succession was endangered, and every preparation was made for future discord and disorder. The Act comprehended all the descendants of George II., except the offspring of princesses married to foreign potentates; and, as there were then thirty thousand persons in England, from the peer to the chimney-sweep, who had royal blood in their veins, this law gave the Sovereign power over the domestic destiny of an incalculable and ever-increasing number of his subjects. It was declared