Indeed, at this period of English history, when young and old France were about to retire before Lord Wellington, the tone of society was anti-continental. The aristocracy conversed in their native tongue; meats, as Heaven sent them, might be seen frequently at the table of a peer; and there was a vulgar prejudice against being poisoned, even though the _artiste_ were warranted true _Parisien_. Saltations, happily unremembered, but bearing as it is believed, a distant affinity to the vulgar affair now termed _contre-danse_, were extensively perpetrated; and persons engaged in the same, instead of being elegantly paralytic, moved as if their limbs were controllable. Then, the refinement of the _valse_ was undiscovered; and if a _cavalier_ ventured to clasp a lady in his arms--Lombard-street to a China orange!--he would have been kicked by husband, father, or brother, out of the room incontinently. Assisted by my father’s letter, the great object of my journey was happily accomplished. Within three weeks the exchange I sought for was effected; and I was in due form gazetted to a lieutenancy in an old regiment cantoned for the winter on the Agueda. At the time I visited the capital, the position a stranger held in society was generally estimated by the quarter he inhabited; and before I started from Dublin, I took counsel touching “the whereabouts” of a suitable abode. Mr. Pryme recommended some place with a “man’s head,” in a lane near Crutched Friars; while Captain Forester, a castle aid-de-camp, denounced the same, declaring it to be only a place fit for a bagman, and recommended Long’s or Stevens’s. Well! it was seventeen years since Mr. Pryme had been in town, and probably Crutched Friars was not as fashionable now as it might have been formerly. Captain Forester infested London every season, and consequently Captain Forester must be right. To Bond-street accordingly I drove. Alas, how blindly people speculate upon events! Had I driven to the “man’s head” in Crutched Friars, I should have been safer by a hundred--“and no mistake.” The intervals between my visits to the Horse Guards were occupied in exploring the capital from Tyburn Turnpike to Tower Hill; and by singular good fortune, I formed an acquaintance with a gentleman to whom London and all its wonders were familiar. He kindly undertook to play bear-leader for the nonce and under the guidance of Colonel Santonier, I traversed “the mighty mass of brick, and stone, and mortar,” even from Dan to Beersheba.