This evening Mr. Dubbin had been incorrigible, and had insisted on intruding his clumsy person upon Lady Fareham’s party, arguing with a dull persistence that his name was on her ladyship’s billet of invitation. “Your name is on a great many invitations only because it is my misfortune to be called by it,” his wife told him. “To sit on a barge after ten o’clock at night in June—the coarsest month in summer—is to court lumbago; and all I hope is ye’ll not be punished by a worse attack than common.” Mr. Dubbin had refused to be discouraged, even by this churlishness from his lady, and appeared in attendance upon her, wearing a magnificent birthday suit of crimson velvet and green brocade, which he meant to present to his favourite actor at the Duke’s Theatre, after he had exhibited himself in it half a dozen times at Whitehall, for the benefit of the great world, and at the Mulberry Garden for the admiration of the _bona-robas_. He was a fat, double-chinned little man, the essence of good nature, and perfectly unconscious of being an offence to fine people. Although not a wit himself, Mr. Dubbin was occasionally the cause of wit in others, if the practice of bubbling an innocent rustic or citizen can be called wit. Rochester and Sir Ralph Masaroon, and one Jerry Spavinger, a gentleman jockey, who was a nobody in town, but a shining light at Newmarket, took it upon themselves to draw the harmless citizen, and, as a preliminary to making him ridiculous, essayed to make him drunk. They were clustered together in a little group somewhat apart from the rest of the company, and were attended upon by a lackey who brought a full tankard at the first whistle on the empty one, and whom Mr. Dubbin, after a rapid succession of brimmers, insisted on calling “drawer.” It was very seldom that Rochester condescended to take part in any entertainment on which the royal sun shone not, unless it were some post-midnight marauding with Buckhurst, Sedley, and a band of wild coursers from the purlieus of Drury Lane. He could see no pleasure in any medium between Whitehall and Alsatia. “If I am not fooling on the steps of the throne, let me sprawl in the gutter with pamphleteers and orange-girls,” said this precocious profligate. “I abhor a reputable party among your petty nobility, and if I had not been in love with Lady Fareham off and on, ever since I cut my second teeth, I would have no hand in such a humdrum business as this.” “There’s not a neater filly in the London stable than her ladyship,” said Jerry, “and I don’t blame your taste. I was side-glassing her yesterday in Hi’ Park, but she didn’t seem to relish the manoeuvre, though I was wearing a Chedreux peruke that ought to strike ’em dead.” “You don’t give your peruke a chance, Jerry, while you frame that ugly phiz in it.”