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but it's a pity he couldn't hold his pen."

foundations were of sand it stood firm. He also told all his friends that he could cure any horse of any trick, and could in Such were some of the honest Doctor's a short time educate the most troublesome soliloquies, as he drove quickly across the mare, provided she were a thoroughbred. heath on this cold, though sunny, NoThe result of this was that his wife sufvember morning. Happily for him, Vixen fered many anxious hours, especially when a new horse was bought by her lord, so that in proportion as the horse lost its tricks Mrs. Smith lost her nerves.

"A splendid creature, my dear; but it has a little trick of shying at nothing. I can soon cure that, and then it will prove a most useful animal." This was his

was in a somewhat pleasanter frame of mind than usual, otherwise, Dr. Smith might have again found himself landed in a hedge, so loosely did he hold the reins as he drove along, his mind being full of "those poor girls."

favourite formula. The "little tricks" of BRIGHTON HALF A CENTURY AGO. this last splendid creature had already landed the Doctor into two hedges, and had spoilt more than one of his vehicles, had broken two collar-bones, dislocated his wrist, and twisted his ankle; but his faith in himself was as firm as ever.

The animal which he was driving this morning required all his attention, so that he could not meditate, as much as he would otherwise have done, about the affair of the Warren and its occupants; but more than once he muttered:

"He might so easily have done it! What on earth--" here his horse nearly bolted at a white milestone, placed on the desolate high road, that crossed the moor over hill and dale towards his own town; so he had to break off for a time. "In the name of all wonder, why didn't he make a will? I could swear that he meant to provide for those girls; and yet Blackston declares he did no such thing, but always said there was time enough, and that he had no intention of dying just yet." Then, in a louder voice, to his groom, Dr. Smith said: "Jones, get down and take that stone out of the mare's off forefoot. How on earth did she manage to get it in Woah-quiet, Vixen."

When Jones had once more twisted himself into the dog-cart, after taking the stone out of the mare's foot, the Doctor made a very decided remark to himself:

"I declare, I'll make my will to-night, and, also, I'll make Blackston acquainted with the fact; not that it matters much about my will. And, ah! well, perhaps he's wrong about the other case-only, certainly, it looks bad, very bad, his wanting to write just as he was breathing his last breath.

"It's a shame, though, about those girls; however, it's none of my business,

WHEN Fanny Burney accompanied Mrs. Thrale to Brighthelmstone in 1779, the fashionable promenade was the Steyne, and the popular evening resorts patronised by strangers were Shergold's New Assembly Rooms, and Hick's at the "Ship Tavern." In 1833, the date of my first visit to the same locality, Brighthelmstone had long since become Brighton, and the Steyne, shorn of its ancient glories, had gradually subsided into what it still is a comparatively deserted thoroughfare, mainly occupied by dozing fly-drivers, and the inevitable blind man and his dog. The Diary of the author of "Evelina" alone preserves from utter oblivion the names of Shergold and Hick, but the old "Ship Tavern," founded by the latter, has gained rather than lost by the lapse of years, and still flourishes as an excellent and well frequented hostelry, one of the few existing links between the present and the past.

When I first knew Brighton, the Pavilion had not yet been purchased by the town, but remained pretty much as it had been in the days of George the Fourth, its appointed custodian occasionally supplementing his salary by exhibiting the gaudily decorated apartments to some stray visitor. Hove was then a remote and thinly populated suburb, the western limits of Brighton proper extending only to Adelaide Crescent and Palmyra Square. Eastward, on the contrary, the tide of fashion was at that period steadily flowing; Kemp Town, with the exception of some half-a-dozen houses still in the workmen's hands, was completed and for the most part inhabited, among the original settlers being the Duke of Devonshire, the Marquis of Bristol, Laurence Peel (brother of Sir Robert), and the projector of this gigantic under

taking, Thomas Read Kemp, for many years member for Lewes.

The last house in Arundel Terrace, the "ultima Thule" of eastern Brighton, was called the "Bush Hotel," exposed to all the winds of heaven, and from the day of its first opening to its final collapse rarely frequented even by a passing stranger. Between Kemp Town and the newly erected Eastern Terrace, a speculation of the tailor Nugee, was a common dotted with two or three small cottages and a tallow manufactory; in one of the former dwelt a singular personage named Murray, popularly supposed to have been to have been a smuggler in his youth, who drove a thriving trade as a dealer in agate snuffboxes and other curiosities, although where and how he got them no one ever succeeded in discovering.

I doubt if even in its best days the Chain Pier could have been a profitable investment for the shareholders, the total amount of twopences paid at the entrance by nonsubscribers never representing more than an infinitesimal dividend; but at the period I write of it had one advantage, of which Newhaven has since deprived it, namely, the excitement produced by the arrival weather permitting-of the Dieppe steamer (the "Dart," Captain Cheeseman), to land or call for passengers, on its way to and from Shoreham harbour.

The idea of endowing the western side of the town with an opposition pier had not yet germed in the brain of any speculative projector, nor had the wildest flight of imagination anticipated the erection of such gigantic caravansaries as the "Grand" or the "Metropole "; people were then contented-as well they might be-with such old-established hotels as the " Bedford," the " "Norfolk," the "Albion," and the "York," all which, by the way, appear to have suffered little, if at all, from the proximity of their colossal rivals.

In those pre-railway days visitors to Brighton had the choice of being conveyed thither by Newman's blue-jacketed "boys," or more economically by one of the regular coaches steered by Sir St. Vincent Cotton, and other accomplished amateur whips, who performed the journey from the "White Horse Cellar" in five hours, treated their passengers to sandwiches and sherry, and pocketed their half-crowns with condescending urbanity.

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very eminent clergymen, all admirable preachers and universally esteemed, namely, Frederick Robertson, James and Robert Anderson. Of these, the first was indisputably the most popular, as the numerous editions of his published sermons sufficiently testify; James Anderson, whom I knew personally from living near him in Arundel Terrace, was the incumbent of St. George's, at the back of Portland Place, and a prominent figure in the best society of Brighton. He was a tall, burly man, with a dignified air and kindly smile ; he was gifted with a rare natural eloquence and an impressive delivery, and it was impoɛsible to listen to him unmoved, and it was truly said that, when he preached a charity sermon, no one succeeded so well in extracting tears from the eyes of his hearers, and money from their pockets. Robert Anderson, on the contrary, was retiring in manner, and rarely seen out of the pulpit; I have been told, however, that he possessed a vein of quiet humour, and remember hearing an anecdote related by him, to one of his intimates, with great gusto. He had recently superintended the repairs of his chapel, the frontage of which had been cemented by a necessary application of mastic, an improvement highly commended by one of his congregation, a worthy, but illiterate, individual, who concluded his eulogium by saying: "I'll tell you what, Mr. Anderson, now that you have finished masticating your chapel, I shall follow your example and masticate my house."

1

The Brightonians of that day, as a rule, could hardly be called enthusiastic play. goers; and the theatre, then as now overlooking the Pavilion gardens, was certainly not as well supported as it deserved to be. At the period in question it was jointly managed by one of the innumerable Vinings and a local dentist named Bew. The stock company was of more than average excellence, several of its members, such as Henry Marston-whom I remember as Rigolio in the "Broken Sword"- Misses Caroline Rankley and Crisp-the latter a capital soubrette-having been subsequently promoted to the metropolitan boards. "Stars" were apt to fight shy of Brighton, owing to the very small encouragement held out to them by the townspeople, the only London celebrities who succeeded in drawing even tolerable audiences being Charles Kean and his wife. I have seen Farren-the "cock salmon "-play three of his best characters to a five-and-twenty pound

house; and when the charming Miss Taylor-Mrs. Walter Lacy-favoured us with a visit, the result was even less satisfactory. Indeed, as far as public amusements went, an occasional concert-generally by second-rate artistes-at the Town Hall, or a subscription ball at the "rooms," sufficed to meet the requirements of the residents, who, being exclusive rather than gregarious, eschewed any approach to familiar intercourse with mere birds of passage, and lived, like Lady Kicklebury, "in their own sphere."

The cricket-ground, called "Brown's," from its owner, one of the mainstays of the Sussex eleven, was situated just beyond what is still termed the "Level," adjoining the high road from London. It was limited in extent, but the matches, especially those between Kent and Sussex, then the leading cricketing counties of England, were more numerously attended than any I have seen in the present far more spacious arena. Kent at that time boasted a team including such admirable players as Fuller Pilch, the two Mynns, Felix, Wenman, and Hillyer; while the home side, besides Brown, was no less efficiently represented by Lillywhite, Broadbridge, Box, Dean, the brothers Napper, and my fellow-Etonian, Charles Taylor.

was then filled by an estimable gentleman, named Eld, of whose peculiar mincing gait Sydney Smith gives the following humorous and accurate description, quoted in Julian Young's Diary: "I never was in Brighton till to-day," he said to a friend; "but nevertheless I have made acquaintance with a great local power. Who he is I know not; but I am certain what he is. It is that distinguished functionary, the M.C.; it could be no one else. It was a gentleman, attired point device, walking down the Parade like Agag, 'delicately.' He pointed out his toes like a dancingmaster, but carried his head high like a potentate." Those who recollect the original will recognise the fidelity of the portrait; it was the very man hit off to the very life.

"I

I do not know if the club on the Old Steyne, between the house formerly occupied by Mrs. Fitzherbert and Castle Square, still exists; but I remember dining there many years ago with an old friend, General Sir William Keir Grant, a thorough cosmopolite and indefatigable traveller, who had lost his right arm in a duel. He was in a merry mood that evening, and accounted for it by saying that he had paid a visit the same afternoon to a newly married couple, Among the permanent residents no one staying at the "Bedford" on their return was more generally popular than the genial from a honeymoon trip to Italy. and kind-hearted Horace Smith, who for found Madame at home," continued the many years occupied, with his wife and General, "and in the course of conversathree daughters, a house in Cavendish tion asked her how she liked Venice. Place. Scarcely less socially in request I was very much disappointed,' she was the eminent tragedian, Charles Young, replied; but, to be sure, we timed our who, after his retitement from the stage, arrival most unluckily, for, only fancy,' passed his remaining days at Brighton, she added, with perfectly unconscious where he died in June, 1856, aged seventy-naïveté, 'the place was flooded all the nine. Another dramatic celebrity, the week we were there, and we had to go Duchess of St. Albans-formerly the arch about in boats!"" and lively Harriet Mellon; but when I knew her a stout, red-faced, and somewhat eccentric old lady-arrived punctually at the commencement of the winter season, and created a periodical sensation by collecting together all sorts of people, at what she called her "omnium gatherums," in Regency Square. I was present at one of these "amalgamations," and can perfectly recollect that while dancing was going on in one room, in another a young fellow was singing "Coal-black Rose," with a scratch wig and a crape mask, both of which he adroitly whipped off and pocketed, previous to convulsing a fresh circle of listeners with the "Calais Packet."

The office of Master of the Ceremonies

In one of the narrow thoroughfares leading from the Marine Parade to St. James's Street was-and possibly still is -a billiard-room, where Kentfield, better known as "Jonathan," was wont to display his masterly skill. Among the habitual frequenters of the establishment was a singular personage familiarly familiarly styled

Badger "; but what may have been the origin of the nickname I never could discover. He certainly was not a partisan of the cruel sport of badger-baiting, nor did he keep a specimen of that unpleasantly smelling animal in the bottom drawer of his wardrobe, like "Soldier Bill" in Whyte Melville's "Satanella"; the sobriquet, however, had somehow or

other stuck to him, and he liked to be called by it. He was a natty little man, always well dressed, and might be seen on most afternoons strolling along the King's Road, and invariably accompanied by his wife, as smartly attired as he was himself. Early one morning, I met him -to my surprise, alone on the Cliff, faultlessly got up as usual, with the exception of his hat, which was of an antiquated shape, and very much the worse for wear.

"Why, Badger," I said, "what could have induced you, of all men in the world, to venture out in such a terribly oldfashioned hat?"

"Ah," he replied, rather ruefully, "it looks odd, but it is only for a day or so. The fact is, there is a match coming off to-day between Jonathan and a London player, which I wouldn't miss seeing, from start to finish, for anything, and could only manage that by contriving that my wife, who is, ahem! rather inclined to have her own way in some things, should dispense with my escort on the promenade this afternoon. So, knowing how particular she is about appearances, I thought it advisable to mislay the hat I generally wear, and routed out this thing from a cupboard. Louisa had no sooner set eyes on it than she positively declared she would not walk out with me again until I found the other, or bought a new hat. So you see," he added, with a significant wink, "of two evils, I choose the least, and wear the old one!"

A MANUAL OF SMALL TALK.

less social, political, or religious "functions"
which, without the presence and utterance
of the local Member of Parliament, are, by
common consent, held to be incomplete.
Yet, when the great man rises to deliver,
impromptu, the speech which he has care-
fully rehearsed beforehand, how he hums
and haws, how he fumbles for the right
word, and misses it five times out of ten;
how often he loses the thread of his argu-
ment, and is driven ignominiously to ran-
sack his sheaf of notes for the idea that
will not come into his brain; how broken-
backed are his sentences, how nicely "de-
ranged his epitaphs," and with what an
evident sense of relief he reaches, at last,
the purple patch of his peroration, in
which, having got it carefully by heart, he
feels that no further mishap is possible!
Shakespeare knew him well-our ordinary
English orator-though, having a whole-
some fear of Court and Parliament before
his eyes, he was too wary to satirise him,
save under the safe disguise of a clerk of
ancient Greece-and by the mouth of an
Athenian Duke :

Where I have come great clerks have purposed
To greet me with premeditated welcomes;
Where I have seen them shiver and look pale,
Make periods in the midst of sentences,
Throttle their practised accent in their fears,
And, in conclusion, dumbly have broke off,
Not paying me a welcome.

If that was not a study from the life-
English life-then criticism is naught, and
Dr. Furnivall's theory anent Shakespeare's
"extra-dramatic bits " is a fond thing vainly
invented.

But if the case of our professional speakers be so parlous, what shall we say of the readiness or unreadiness of the mere ordinary member of society? A TONGUE like the pen of a ready Who does not know the long-drawn agony writer is one of the last traits which any of the moments which follow upon an incompetent observer would include among troduction, whether at garden party, or "at the characteristics of the average English- home," or conversazione, or, worst of all, man or Englishwoman. As a nation, we in that terrible period of unrest in the are undoubtedly slow of speech. If we drawing-room which immediately precedes except some half-dozen of our greatest a modern dinner, and which is peculiarly orators, even our most practised public entitled to be considered the Englishman's speakers do not attain to anything like "mauvais quart d'heure"? What would fluency-and, Heaven knows, it is not for not one give to escape from, or to abbrewant of practice. The average politician viate, the trying interval of enforced silence is nothing if not a speaker. Even those when the shy and hungry pair just introwho, in "the House," are but "dumb duced to one another's acquaintance have dogs," find themselves in perpetual re- exhausted all their ideas about the weather, quest as orators, either on electioneering and the Academy, and the last explosion platforms or at public dinners, at the on board an ironclad, and now sit or stand opening of a church bazaar or the laying helplessly and hopelessly racking their the foundation-stone of a lunatic asylum, brains for any subject on which articulate in a word, at one or other of those count-speech may be possible? At such times,

even the gawky youth who fingers the dainty china with which his hostess has decorated her mantelpiece, until the ugliest and most precious specimen drops with a crash into the fender, is apt to appear almost a benefactor to his species; for, at least, his crime thaws the frozen tongues and loosens the limbs stiffened by selfconsciousness, and amid the universal chorus of sympathy and suggestion the social ice breaks up and melts-if only for a time.

I am told that, in America, professors of small talk exist, who, for an adequate fee, will undertake to furnish the social aspirant with a continuous flow of ideas, and to drill him or her into intelligible and even elegant and grammatical utterance of the same; but I have not heard that any such school has yet been established among our selves, though, indeed, "'twere a consum mation devoutly to be wished." The most fruitful suggestion that I have yet heard made on the subject, on English soil, was imparted to me, recently, by a gallant young defender of his country who, having just returned from a term of service in Canada, had perhaps become infected with some touch of Yankee cuteness.

His method-and I am bound to say that whether because of it, or in spite of it, his fount of converse very seldom ran dry consisted in going through the alphabet in regular order, and broaching in turn a subject beginning with each successive letter. Thus, on his first introduction to the lady whom he was to take in to dinner, he would start with a remark on the Academy. If this failed to lead to a conversation, he would try Banshees, and then Cremation, and so on through Dancing, and Education, and Foreign Travel, and Gigantic Gooseberries, to Yachting and Zola, or until a subject was started which struck a sympathetic chord in his interlocutrix. Personally, so he confided to me, he had never known the method to fail, though, on one occasion, he got as far as M before his silent companion was wooed into eloquence on the subject of matrimony-a topic, alas, as dangerous as it is doubtless attractive.

I have not yet had an opportunity of testing the value of the process myself, and am reserving it for some social knot worthy of so desperate a solution. Meanwhile, I have found it, on occasion, not unprofitable to make the mutual embarrassment of myself and partner the theme of conversation, and so to convert the ailment

into its own antidote. By the time we have agreed how difficult it is to find topics of conversation with a new acquaintance, and have exchanged experiences on the subject, enlivened perhaps by reminiscences of awkward predicaments in which we have found ourselves placed in this respect, we are already fairly at home with one another almost without knowing it, and have skil fully cured ourselves by this homoeopathic treatment of our nervous affection.

For after all, in the matter of small talk, more than any other, the old proverb holds good: "Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte." We have all-even the dullest of us-plenty to talk about, if we can only get fairly under weigh. The difficulty is to make the start; and just as a welleducated Englishman has usually a fairly large vocabulary of French words, and yet seldom attains to fluency in talking French because he can't get them into circulation, so the average diner-out has really a quite sufficient fountain - head of conversation stored up in his or her brain, and yet never shines as a talker, because he (or she) cannot set the current flowing from the cistern of thought into the conduit pipes of speech.

A well-known novelist is wont to relate how she was once attacked by a yearning amateur with the following remarks:

"Oh, my dear Mrs.

how nice it must be to write a novel! and to get paid for it! I'm sure I could do it if I tried. How d'ye begin?"

"How d'ye begin?" Whatever may be the case with novel-writing-of which I desire to speak with all the reverence of profoundest ignorance-that is the crucial question for every man or woman, boy or girl, who is ambitious, as Mark Twain has it, to "keep his (or her) right end uppermost in conversation."

And behold, to help us to the solution of this most practical and most perplexing question, comes from the press of Messrs. R. Bentley and Son, with all the pleasantness of wide margins and glossy paper and clear type, the first of a promised series of "Dullard's Handbooks," entitled, "Conversational Openings and Endings; Some Hints for playing the game of Small Talk," a book which, as its name implies, has for its object to suggest how we may most fruitfully begin and most gracefully eonclude the constant interchanges of small talk which Society is for ever calling upon us to effect.

Starting with the happy conceit that

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