And as for those long walks in the country, which he talked of so fondly in some of his letters to his friends,--those walks to Hoddesdon, to Amwell, to Windsor, and other towns and villages in the near vicinity of London, which he had enjoyed in anticipation a few years before he had the leisure actually to take them,--those long walks on "fine Isaac-Walton mornings," were found to be, it must be confessed, rather tiresome and unsatisfactory. They were most melancholy failures, when compared--as Elia could not help comparing them--with the pleasant walks he and Mary had taken years before to Enfield, and Potter's-Bar, and Waltham. Nay, even the "saunterings in Bond Street," the "digressions into Soho," to explore book-stalls, the visits to print-shops and picture-galleries, soon ceased to afford Lamb much real pleasure or enjoyment. Yea, London itself, with all its wonders and marvels, with all its (to him) memories and associations, he found to be, to one who had nothing to do but wander idly and purposeless through her thronged and busy streets and thoroughfares,--a mere looker-on in Vienna,--a somewhat dreary and melancholy place. Indeed, the London of 1825-30 was a far different place to Elia from the London of twenty years before, when he resided at No. 4, Inner-Temple Lane, (near the place of his "kindly engendure,") and gave his famous Wednesday-evening parties, ("Oh!" exclaims Hazlitt, "for the pen of John Buncle to consecrate a _petit souvenir_ to their memory!") and when Jem White, and Ned P----, and Holcroft, and Captain Burney, and other of his old friends and jovial companions were alive and merry.