For thee, Gentleman George, for thee, what conclusive valediction remains? Alas! since we began the strange and mumming scene wherein first thou went introduced, the grim foe hath knocked thrice at thy gates; and now, as we write,--[In 1830]--thou art departed thence,--thou art no more! A new lord presides to thine easy-chair, a new voice rings from thy merry board,--thou art forgotten! thou art already, like these pages, a tale that is told to a memory that retaineth not! Where are thy quips and cranks; where thy stately coxcombries and thy regal gauds? Thine house and thy pagoda, thy Gothic chimney and thy Chinese sign- post,--these yet ask the concluding hand. Thy hand is cold; their completion, and the enjoyment the completion yields, are for another! Thou sowest, and thy follower reaps; thou buildest, thy successor holds; thou plantest, and thine heir sits beneath the shadow of thy trees,-- "Neque harum, quas colis, arborum Te, praeter invisas cupressos, Ulla brevem dominum sequetur!" ["Nor will any of these trees thou didst cultivate follow thee, the shortlived lord, save the hateful Cyprus."] At this moment thy life,--for thou veert a Great Man to thine order, and they have added thy biography to that of Abershaw and Sheppard,--thy life is before us. What a homily in its events! Gayly didst thou laugh into thy youth, and run through the courses of thy manhood. Wit sat at thy table, and Genius was thy comrade. Beauty was thy handmaid; and Frivolity played around thee,--a buffoon that thou didst ridicule, and ridiculing enjoy! Who among us can look back to thy brilliant era, and not sigh to think that the wonderful men who surrounded thee, and amidst whom thou wert a centre and a nucleus, are for him but the things of history, and the phantoms of a bodiless tradition? Those brilliant. suppers, glittering with beauty, the memory of which makes one spot (yet inherited by Bachelor Bill) a haunted and a fairy ground; all who gathered to that Armida's circle,--the Grammonts and the Beauvilliers and the Rochefoucaulds of England and the Road,--who does not feel that to have seen these, though but as Gil Blas saw the festivities of his actors, from the sideboard and behind the chair, would have been a triumph for the earthlier feelings of his old age to recall? What, then, must it have been to have seen them as thou didst see,--thou, the deceased and the forgotten!---seen them from the height of thy youth and power and rank (for early wert thou keeper to a public), and reckless spirits, and lusty capacities of joy? What pleasures where sense lavished its uncounted varieties? What revellings where wine was the least excitement?