THE DAY OF THE DISASTERS OF CARFINGTON BLUNDELL, ESQUIRE.

Description of a penurious independent gentleman, fond of invitations and the great.-He takes his way to a “dining out."-His calamities on the road.-And on his return.

CARFINGTON BLUNDELL, Esquire, aged six-andthirty, but apparently a dozen years older, was a spare, well-dressed, sickly-looking, dry sort of leisurely individual, of respectable birth, very small income, and no abilities. He was the younger son of the younger son of a younger brother; and not being able to marry a fortune (which once, they say, nearly made him die for love), and steering clear, with a provoking philosophy, of the corkscrew curls and pretty staircase perplexities of the young ladies of lodging-houses, contrived to live in London upon the rent of half a dozen cottages in Berkshire.

Having, in fact, no imagination, Carfington Blundell, Esquire, had no sympathies, except with the wants and wishes of that interesting personage, Carfington Blundell, Esquire-of whom he always bore

about with him as lively an image in his brain as it was possible for it to possess, and with whom, when other people were of the least consequence to his inclinations, he was astonished that the whole world did not hasten to sympathize. On every other occasion, the only thing which he had to do with his fellow-creatures, all and every of them, was, he thought, to leave them alone;-an excellent principle, as far as concerns their own wish to be so left, but not quite so much so in the reverse instances; such, for example, as when they have fallen into ditches, or want to be paid their bills, or have a turn for delicate attentions, or under any other circumstances which induce people to suppose that you might as well do to them as you would be done by. Mr. Blundell, it is true, was a regular payer of his bills; and though, agreeably to that absorption of himself in the one interesting idea above mentioned, he was not famous for paying delicate attentions, except where he took a fancy to having them paid to himself; yet, provided the morning was not very cold or muddy, and he had a stick with him for the individual to lay hold of, and could reckon upon using it without soiling his shoes, or straining his muscles, the probability is, that he might have helped a man out of a ditch. As people, however, are not in the habit of falling into ditches, especially about Regent-street, and as it was not easy to conjecture in what other instances Mr. Blundell might have deemed it fitting to evince a sense of the

existence of anything but his own coat and waistcoat, muffins, mutton cutlet, and bed, certain it is, that the sympathies of others were anything but lively towards himself; and they would have been less so, if the only other intense idea which he had in his head, to-wit, that of his birth and connexions (which he pretty freely overrated), had not instinctively led him to hit upon the precise class of acquaintances, to whom his insipidity could have been welcome.

These acquaintances, with whom he dined frequently (and breakfasted too), were rich men, of a grade a good deal lower than himself; and to such of these as had not "unexpectedly left town," he gave a sort of a quiet, particular, just-enough kind of a lodging-house dinner once a year, the shoe-black in gloves assisting the deputy under-waiter from the tavern. The friends out of town he paid with regrets at their "lamented absence;" and the whole of them he would have thought amply recompensed, even without his giving into this fond notion of the necessity of a dinner on his part, by the fact of his eating their good things, and talking of his fifth cousin the Marquis; a personage, by the way, who never heard of him. He did, indeed, once contrive to pick up the Marquis's glove at the opera, and to intimate at the same time that his name was Blundell; upon which the noble lord, staring somewhat, but good-humouredly smiling withal, said, “Much obliged to you, Mr. Bungle." As to his positive

insipidity over the hock and pine-apples of his friends, Mr. Blundell never dreamt of such a thing; and if he happened to sit next to any wit, or other lion of the day, who seemed of consequence enough to compete with the merits of his presence, he thought it amply set off by his taste in having had such ancestors, and indeed in simply being that identical Mr. Blundell, who, in having no merits at all, was gifted by the kind providence of nature with a proportionate sense of his enjoying a superabundance of them.

To complete the idea of him in the reader's mind, his manners were gentlemanly, except that they betrayed now and then too nice a sense of his habiliments. His hat he always held in the best way adapted to keep it in shape; and a footman coming once too softly into a room where he was waiting during a call, detected him in the act of dusting his boots with an extra coloured handkerchief, which he always carried about with him for that purpose. He calculated, that with allowance for changes in the weather, it saved him a good four months' coach-hire.

Such was the accomplished individual, who, in the month of May, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven, and in a "fashionable dress of the first water" (as Sir Phelim called it), issued forth from his lodgings near St. James's, drawing the air through his teeth with an elegant indifference, coughing slightly at intervals out of

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emotion, and, to say the truth, as happy as coat and hat, hunger, a dinner-party, and a fine day could make him. Had the weather been in the smallest degree rainy, or the mansion for which he was bound at any distance, the spectators were to understand that he would have come in his own carriage, or at least that he intended to call a coach; but as the day was so very fine, and he kept looking at every door that he passed, as though each were the one he was about to knock at, the conclusion to be drawn was, that having but a little way to go, and possessing a high taste for superiority to appearances, it was his pleasure to go on foot. Vulgar wealth might be always making out its case. Dukes and

he could afford to dispense with pretension.

The day was beautiful, the sky blue, the air a zephyr, the ground in that perfect state for walking (a day or two before dust) when there is a sort of dry moisture in the earth, and people in the country prefer the road to the path. The house at which our hero was going to dine, was midway between the west end and the north-east; and he had just got half-way, and was in a very quiet street, when in the "measureless content" of his anticipations, he thought he would indulge his eyesight with one or two of those personal ornaments, the presence of which, on leaving the house, he always ascertained with sundry pattings of his waistcoat and coat pockets. Having, therefore, again assured himself that he had duly got his two pocket-handkerchiefs