"Good G----!" said Mr. Ripple who was approaching the archway from the other side. "Good G----, sir, are you mad?" To Mr. Ripple the shock was great. He had aspirations for Mr. Lovely. To be sure, he was wild, an extravagant young dog, but then he possessed an inimitable assurance of manner, a pretty talent for polite verse-making, and a consummate taste in brocades. The Beau of late had often pondered the choice of his successor. He had aspirations for Mr. Lovely and now he saw his favourite positively panting (the most ungenteel motion and fatal to the fall of a waistcoat), not merely panting but smeared with mould, hugging potsherds, and apparently quite unmoved by his degradation. Is it wonderful that Mr. Ripple cried, "Good G----, sir, are you mad?" "Yes," shouted Mr. Lovely. "Or drunk?" "Yes," shouted Mr. Lovely. As he seemed inclined to answer every question in the affirmative, the Beau remarked he wished to see a representative group of the young gentlemen at the Blue Boar upon a matter of the gravest social and civick importance. Our hero ejaculated, "With you in the twinkling of a bedpost," and raced across the yard, up the first staircase, along the first gallery and into the last room. A light broke upon Mr. Ripple's bewilderment. "He has discovered some prehistorick relicks. Probably Cinerary Urn, a Lunette or possibly a gold coin of Rome." In pleasant anticipation, the Beau who was an intimate friend of Mr. Sylvanus Urban, beheld the folded copper-plate illustrating the discovery and the rounded sentences on the opposite page of the _Gentleman's Magazine_ in which the excavations would be carefully recorded by Horace Ripple. "This must assuage my wrath," he decided by the door of the coffee-room. To tell the truth, the Beau was on censure bent when he met our hero outside the _Blue Boar_. Already, that morning, he had alluded to the riotous nocturnal behaviour, the assaults upon the watch, the fusilade of empty bottles, but not being able to descry a single offender, he determined that personal and individual remonstrance would be more efficacious. To the _Blue Boar_ therefore, he went having first exchanged his suit of olive green for one of black sattin unrelieved by silver and terminated by ruffles whose cambrick fell in severe folds and condemnatory lines. As he stepped from the Great House round the Crescent and along the High Street, he passed in sombre eclipse upon the gaiety of subjects shining with the reflection of his genteel rays. Presently Mr. Lovely came back still bearing the marks of the potted soil. "Was it an Urn?" Mr. Lovely looked surprized. "A Lachrymatory perhaps? Or a Lunette? Or," Mr. Ripple grew breathless with excitement, "not an Image of AEsculapius?" "Pray, sir, are you trying to humour a madman? Because on my soul, I don't know what you are driving at."