downstairs with one of the hair-dressers, who went me halves in a bottle of Beaune, and swore eternal friendship to me over a _Mayonnaise de homard_. But to return to the conversazione world of London. Suppose we take a literary one to begin with: say one of Mrs. Van Umbug’s Thursdays. Mrs. Van Umbug lives at that classically severe mansion, the “Arena. Gladiator’s Crescent, Nero Square.” Mr. Van Umbug is a member of Parliament, and sits on the Liberal side of the House, but nobody takes much notice of him, and he is usually alluded to as Mrs. Van Umbug’s husband. If you ask the coachman in the adjacent mews whose horses are those the helper is harnessing to the brougham, he will probably answer, “Mrs. Van Umbug’s.” The servants in the house in Gladiator Street, talk continually of “Missus” (who makes her presence not only seen but felt), but scarcely ever mention “Master.” The tradespeople usually send in their bills to Mrs. Van Umbug; and it is certain that it is that lady who issues the invitations and receives the company at her Thursday conversaziones. Mr. Van Umbug, M.P., is scarcely ever seen at those gatherings, and when he is, rarely, manifest, it is in a very meek and subdued manner. He sneaks in and out as if the house didn’t belong to him (which, indeed, it does not), and appears desperately afraid of the portly man in black with the white Berlin gloves who hands round the tea and coffee. Mrs. Van Umbug’s mansion is supposed to be furnished in the highest style of taste and virtu. Hers is quoted as an abode of all that is elegant, _recherché_, and _distingué_. What are taste and virtu, I wonder? what makes things elegant, _distingué_, and _recherché_? Do chairs that you can’t sit down upon, and spindled-shanked tables, tottering beneath the weight of gaudily-bound books, containing specimens of chromo-lithography? do a sham pre-Raphaelite picture or two, in which a long-legged swain is courting a lady with yellow hair and a striped dress falling in unnatural folds, under the lee of a marvellously-executed waterbutt—a curiously-manipulated mangold-wurzel, and a minutely finished frying-pan occupying the foreground? do scraps of armour and oak-carvings, supposed to be ancient, but in reality manufactured the week before last in Wardour Street? do odds and ends, and Chinese monsters in porcelain, and a Louis Quinze clock, and the model of a Swiss châlet in box-wood, and an imitation grotto and aquarium in an ante-room? I suppose these things do. This present Thursday at Mrs. Van Umbug’s is a great literary one.