I have reason to believe that my aunt Margaret was the last person who ever journeyed from London to Brighton in a post-chaise—a mode of travel, she was wont to remark, justly eulogised by the wisest and best of men and Londoners. If he had been spared to see a railway locomotive, she expressed herself as confident that he would have considered it the direct offspring of the devil; and that conjectural opinion of the great lexicographer she herself shared to her dying day. Like him, she was a Londoner, and took an immense interest, not municipal of course, but social, in the affairs of the great city. ‘My dear,’ she often used to say reprovingly, when speaking of some event of which I was obliged to confess I had never so much as heard, ‘it was the topic of every tongue.’ Although she had never been the theme of London gossip herself, she had been very closely connected with one who had been; and to those who were intimate with her he was the constant subject of her discourse. Her thoughts dwelt more with him, I am sure, than with all the other personages together with whom she had been acquainted during her earthly pilgrimage; and yet she always thought of him in his adolescence, as a very young man. ‘He was just your age, my dear,’ she was wont to say to me, ‘when he became the “Talk of the Town.”’ Perhaps this circumstance gave him an additional interest in my eyes; but certainly her account of this one famous personage was more interesting to me than everything else which Aunt Margaret had to tell me. It has dwelt in my mind for many a year, and when this is the case with any story, I have generally found that I have been able to interest others in its recital. In this particular case, however, my way is not so plain as usual. The story is not _my_ story, nor even Aunt Margaret’s; in its more important details it is common property. On the other hand, not even the oldest inhabitant has any remembrance of it. The hearts that were once wounded to the quick by the occurrences which I am about to describe can be no more pained by any allusion to them; they have long been dust. No relative, to my knowledge, is now living of the unfortunate young man whose memory—execrated by the crowd—was kept so green and fresh (watered by her tears) by one living soul for nearly eighty years. Why should I not tell his ‘pitiful story?’