That tall, pale, interesting-looking man in chains and ringlets has already created much commotion below with his insatiable demands for foot-baths and hot water. As he waits carelessly in the passage at that closed door, receiving and returning the admiring glances of passing chambermaids, you would hardly suppose, from his unassuming demeanour, that he is no less a person than Lord Mount Helicon’s _gentleman_. To be sure, he is now what he calls “comparatively incog.” It is only at his club in Piccadilly, or “the room” at Wassailworth, where he and the Duke’s “own man” lay down the law upon racing, politics, wine, and women, that he is to be seen in his full glory. To give him his due, he is an admirable servant, as far as his own duties are concerned, and a clever fellow to boot, or he would not have picked up seven-and-thirty pounds to-day on the steeple-chase whilst he was looking after the luncheon and the carriage. We question, however, whether he could complete his toilet as expeditiously as his master, who is now stamping about his room reciting, in an audible voice, a thundering ode on which he has been some considerable time engaged, and elaborating the folds of his white neckcloth (old fifth-form tie) between the stanzas. Lord Mount Helicon is a literary nobleman; not one of “Your authors who’s all author, fellows In foolscap uniforms turned up with ink;” but a sportsman as well as a scholar, a man of the world as well as a man of letters; given overmuch to betting, horse-racing, and dissipation in general, but with as keen a zest for the elegances of literature as for those beauties of the drama to which he pays fully more attention, and one who can compute you the odds as readily as he can turn a lyric or round a flowing period. Had his lordship possessed a little more common sense and a slight modicum of prudence, forethought, reflection, and such plebeian qualities, he need not have failed in any one thing he undertook. As it was, his best friends regretted he should waste his talents so unsparingly on versification; whilst his enemies (the bitter dogs) averred “Mount Helicon’s rhyme was, if possible, worse than his reason.” Being member for Guyville (our readers will probably call to mind how the columns of their daily paper were filled with the Guyville Election Committee’s Report, and the wonderful appetite for “treating” displayed by the “free and independent” of that town during their “three glorious days”)--being member, then, of course it is incumbent on him to attend the ball; so after a hurried dinner with Lacquers, Sir Ascot, Major D’Orville, and sundry other gentlemen who _live_ every day of their lives, behold him curling his red whiskers and attiring his tall, gaunt form in a suit of decorous black. “Deuced bad dinner they give one here,” said his lordship to himself, still hammering away at the ode. “Wish I hadn’t drunk that second bottle of claret, and smoked so much.