Of course there are some titled folks at Mrs. Van Umbug’s conversazione: it would not be complete without a literary lord—a harmless nobleman, generally, who has translated Horace, invented a new metre, or discovered a new butterfly; and a literary lady—if separated from her husband all the better, who paints him in the darkest of colours, as the hero of every one of her novels. And, equally of course, Ethelred Guffoon is here. Ethelred Guffoon is everywhere. He is one of Mrs. Van Umbug’s special favourites. She calls him by his Christian name. He hunts up new lions for her; occasionally he officiates as peacemaker, and prevents the lions from growling and fighting among themselves. He rushes from Mrs. Van Umbug’s conversazione to the Pontoppidan Theatre, to see a new face, which he must criticise; after that he will sit up half the night to review Mr. Gladstone’s Homer, for the “Daily Scratcher,” and will be at Somerset House by punctual office hours the next morning. A man of the age, Ethelred Guffoon—a man of the time, a good fellow, but frivolous. I wonder whether the celebrities one sees at this shadowy conversazione really represent the literary world—the real people who write the books and think the thoughts. I am afraid they do not. I fear that to find the princes of the pen, the giants of the land of letters, I must go further afield. Lo, here is Great Tom of Chelsea, sitting cosily, in his back parlour, smoking a pipe of bird’s-eye with Eglintoun Beaverup, and telling him he is about having his ceilings whitewashed. Here is Lord Livy poring over Restoration and Revolution broadsides by his reading-lamp in his lonely chambers in the Albany;—no, not lonely, the spirits of the old historic men come from their dusty shelves and clap him on the shoulder, and cry, “Go on and prosper, Thomas Babington, Lord Livy.” The great Mr. Polyphemus, the novelist, is bidden to the Duke of Sennacherib’s, and as he rolls to Sennacherib House in his brougham, meditates satiric onslaughts on “Tom Garbage” and “Young Grubstreet”—those Tom Thumb foes of his[12]—in the next number of the “Pennsylvanians.” Mr. Goodman Twoshoes is reading one of his own books to the members of the Chawbacon Athenæum, and making, I am delighted to hear, a mint of money by the simple process. Goldpen, the poet, has taken his wife and children to Miss P. Horton’s entertainment; Bays, the great dramatist, is sitting in the stalls of the Pontoppidan Theatre listening with rapt ears to the jokes in his own farce; and Selwyn Cope, the essayist, is snoring snugly between the sheets, having to rise very early to-morrow morning in order to see a man hanged. And where are the working-men of literature, the conscripts of the pen, doomed to carry Brown Bess, for sixpence a day, all their lives? Where are Garbage and Grubstreet? In the worst inn’s worst room, with racing prints half hung, the walls of plaster and the floors of sand, at once a deal table but