No place makes a man forget his years so much as London. In the great city, one unit of that circling population rapidly loses his individuality. There nothing seems extraordinary--nothing seems out of the common course of events--there, it is proverbial, people of all pretensions immediately find their own level. If a man thinks he is wiser, or better, or cleverer, or handsomer, or stronger, or more famous than his neighbours, in London he will be sure to meet those who can equal, if not excel him, in all for which he gives himself credit; and so if an elderly gentleman begins to feel at his country-place that all around him speaks of maturity, not to say decay--that his young trees, and his old buildings, and his missing contemporaries, and the boy to whom he gave apples standing for the county, and the village he remembers a hamlet growing into a town, and all such progressive arrangements of Father Time, hint rather personally at old-fellowhood--let him come to London, and take his diversion amongst a crowd of fools more ancient than himself: he will feel a boy again--Regent Street will not appear altered to his enchanted eye, though they _have_ taken down the colonnade in that well-remembered thoroughfare. Pall Mall is as much Pall Mall to him as it was when he trod it in considerably tighter boots, never mind how many years ago. At his club the same waiter (waiters never die) will bring him the paper, and stir the fire for him, just as he used to do when the Reform Bill was a thing unheard of, and he can contemplate his bald head in the very same mirror that once reflected locks of Hyacinthine cluster. He meets an old crony, and he is shocked (though but for the moment) to find him so dreadfully altered--it is possible the old crony, in his heart of hearts, may return the compliment, but in all human probability he will greet the friend of his boyhood as if he had seen him the day before yesterday. If a very demonstrative man, and it should be before two o’clock in the day--for in the afternoon our English manners are all squared to the same pattern--the old crony may perhaps exclaim, with languid rapture, “Why, I haven’t seen you _for ages_; I don’t think you were in London _all_ last season!” Why should our gentleman from the country undeceive him, and tell him they have not met for more than twenty years, and remind him with mellowing heart of boyhood’s sunny hours and joyous escapades? The old crony will only think him _a twaddle_ and _a bore_, and thank his stars that he has stuck to London and the world, and his gods, such as they are, and is a much _younger_ man of his age than his rustic friend. And so our country mouse will find in a day or two that the artificial sits quite as easily upon _him_. When he has visited two or three of his old haunts he will feel as if he had never left them. He will go, perhaps, to some well-remembered palace of revelry, and find there, it may be, one contemporary out of a hundred with whom he once