The glory of Bond-street is no more. The title of Bond-street lounger has faded from our lips. In vain the crowd of equipages and the blaze of shops: the renown of Bond-street was in its pavement--its pedestrians. Art thou old enough, O reader! to remember the Bond-street Lounger and his incomparable generation? For my part, I can just recall the decline of the grand era. It was on its wane when, in the ambition of boyhood, I first began to muse upon high neck-cloths and Wellington boots. But the ancient _habitués_--the _magni nominis umbræ_--contemporaries of Brummell in his zenith--boon companions of George IV. in his regency--still haunted the spot. From four to six in the hot month of June, they sauntered stately to and fro, looking somewhat mournful even then--foreboding the extinction of their race. The Bond-street Lounger was rarely seen alone: he was a social animal, and walked arm-in-arm with his fellow-man. He did not seem born for the cares of these ruder times; not made was he for an age in which Finsbury returns members to Parliament. He loved his small talk; and never since then has talk been so pleasingly small. Your true Bond-street Lounger had a very dissipated look. His youth had been spent with heroes who loved their bottle. He himself had perhaps supped with Sheridan. He was by nature a spendthrift: you saw it in the roll of his walk. Men who make money rarely saunter; men who save money rarely swagger. But saunter and swagger both united to stamp PRODIGAL on the Bond-street Lounger. And so familiar as he was with his own set, and so amusingly supercilious with the vulgar residue of mortals whose faces were strange to Bond-street. But He is gone. The world, though sadder for his loss, still strives to do its best without him; and our young men, nowadays, attend to model cottages, and incline to Tractarianism--I mean those young men who are quiet and harmless, as a Bond-street Lounger was of old--_redeunt Saturnia regna_. Still the place, to an unreflecting eye, has its brilliancy and bustle. But it is a thoroughfare, not a lounge. And adown the thoroughfare, somewhat before the hour when the throng is thickest, passed two gentlemen of an appearance exceedingly out of keeping with the place. Yet both had the air of men pretending to aristocracy--an old-world air of respectability and stake in the country, and Church-and-Stateism. The burlier of the two was even rather a beau in his way. He had first learned to dress, indeed, when Bond-street was at its acmé, and Brummell in his pride. He still retained in his garb the fashion of his youth; only what then had spoken of the town, now betrayed the life of the country. His neckcloth ample and high, and of snowy whiteness, set off to comely advantage a face smooth-shaven, and of clear, florid hues; his coat of royal blue, with buttons in which you might have seen yourself _veluti in speculum_, was, rather jauntily, buttoned across