We have almost lost sight of Lord Mount Helicon since the Guyville ball, but he now turns up, attending to business, as he calls it, and is sitting in Mr. Bracketts’ back-room, driving as hard a bargain as he can for the barter of his intellectual produce, and conducting the sale in his usual careless, good-humoured manner, although he has a bill coming due to-morrow, and ready money is a most important consideration. The little back-room is perfectly lined with newspapers, magazines, prospectuses, books, proof-sheets, and manuscripts, whilst the aristocracy of talent frown in engravings from the walls--faces generally not so remarkable for their beauty as for a dishevelled, untidy expression, consequent on disordered hair pushed back from off the temples, and producing the unbecoming effect of having been recently exposed to a gale of wind; nevertheless, the illegible autographs beneath symbolise names which fill the world. Mr. Bracketts, the presiding genius of the place, is a remarkable man; his broad, high brow and deep-set flashing eyes betray at once the man of intellect, the champion whose weapon is the brain, whilst his spare, bent frame is attenuated by that mental labour which produces results precisely the converse of healthy physical exertion. Mr. Bracketts might have been a great poet, a successful author, or a scientific explorer; but, like the grocer’s apprentice who is clogged with sweets till he loathes the very name of sugar, our publisher has been surfeited with talent till he almost pines to be a boor, to exchange the constant intellectual excitement which wears him to shreds for placid ignorance, a good appetite, and fresh air. How can he find time to embody his own thoughts who is continually perusing, rejecting, perhaps licking into shape those of others? How can he but be disgusted with the puny efforts of the scribbler’s wing, when he himself feels capable of flights that would soar far out of the ken of that every-day average authorship of which his soul is sick?--so beyond an occasional slashing review, written in no forbearing spirit, he seldom puts pen to paper, save to score and interline and correct; yet is he, with all his conscious superiority, not above our national prejudices in favour of what we playfully term _good_ society. We fear he had rather go to a “crush” at Lady Dinadam’s than sup with Boz. He is an Englishman, and his heart warms to a peer--so he lets Lord Mount Helicon down very easy, and offers him three hundred for his manuscript. “Hang it, Bracketts,” said his lordship, “it’s worth more than that--look what it cost me; if it hadn’t been for that cursed ‘Sea-breeze’ chorus I should have been at Newmarket, when ‘Bowse-and-Bit’ won ‘The Column’--and I should have landed ‘_a Thou_’ _at least_. But I was so busy at it I was late for the train. Come, Bracketts, spring a point, and I’ll put you ‘on’ about ‘Sennacherib’ for the Goodwood Cup.”