realities of life, where marriages are governed in so vast a proportion by convenience, prudence, self-interest-anything, in short, rather than deep sympathy between the partiesand, consequently, where so many men must be crossed in their inclinations, we yet hear of so few tragic catastrophes on that account. The King, however, was certainly among the number of those who are susceptible of a deep passion, if everything be true that is reported of him. All the world has heard that he was passionately devoted to the beautiful sister of the then Duke of Richmond. That was before his marriage and I believe it is certain that he not only wished, but sincerely meditated, to have married her. So much is matter of notoriety. But other circumstances of the case have been sometimes reported, which imply great distraction of mind, and a truly profound possession of his heart by that early passion: which, in a prince whose feelings are liable so much to the dispersing and dissipating power of endless interruption from new objects and fresh claims on the attention, coupled also with the fact that he never but in this one case professed anything amounting to extravagant or frantic attachment, do seem to argue that the King was truly and passionately in love with Lady Sarah Lennox. He had a demon upon him, and was under a real possession. If so, what a lively expression of the mixed condition of human fortunes, and not less of another truth equally affecting-viz., the dread conflicts with the willthe mighty agitations which silently, and in darkness, are convulsing many a heart, where, to the external eye, all is tranquil that this king, at the very threshold of his public career, at the very moment when he was binding about his brows the golden circle of sovereignty; when Europe watched him with interest, and the kings of the earth with envy; not one of the vulgar titles to happiness being wanting-youth, health, a throne the most splendid on this planet-general popularity amongst a nation of freemen, and the hope which belongs to powers as yet almost untriedthat, even under these most flattering auspices, he should be called upon to make a sacrifice the most bitter of all to which human life is liable! He made it; and he might then have said to his people-"For you, and to my public

duties, I have made a sacrifice which none of you would have made for me." In years long ago, I have heard a woman of rank recurring to the circumstances of Lady Sarah's first appearance at court after the King's marriage. If I recollect rightly, it occurred after that lady's own marriage with Sir Charles Bunbury. Many eyes were upon both parties at that moment-female eyes, especially—and the speaker did not disguise the excessive interest with which she herself observed them. Lady Sarah was not agitated, but the King was. He seemed anxious, sensibly trembled, changed colour, and shivered, as Lady S. B. drew near. But, to quote the one single eloquent sentiment which I remember after a lapse of thirty years in Monk Lewis's Romantic Tales-"In this world all things pass away; blessed be Heaven, and the bitter pangs by which sometimes it is pleased to recall its wanderers, even our passions pass away!" And thus it happened that this storm also was laid asleep and forgotten, together with so many others of its kind that have been, and that shall be again, so long as man is man, and woman woman. Meantime, in justification of a passion so profound, one would be glad to think highly of the lady that inspired it; and, therefore, I heartily hope that the insults offered to her memory in the scandalous Memoirs" of the Duc de Lauzun are mere calumnies, and records rather of his presumptuous wishes, than of any actual successes.2

1 The marriage of Lady Sarah Lennox with Sir Thomas Charles Bunbury, Bart., was in 1762.-M.

2 That book, I am aware, is generally treated as a forgery; but internal evidence, drawn from the tone and quality of the revelations there made, will not allow me to think it altogether such. There is an abandon and carelessness in parts which mark its sincerity. Its authenticity I cannot doubt. But that proves nothing for the truth of the particular stories which it contains. A book of scandalous and defamatory stories, especially where the writer has had the baseness to betray the confidence reposed in his honour by women, and to boast of favours alleged to have been granted him, it is always fair to consider as ipso facto a tissue of falsehoods; and on the following argument,— that these are exposures which, even if true, none but the basest of men would have made. Being, therefore, on the hypothesis most favourable to his veracity, the basest of men, the author is selfdenounced as vile enough to have forged the stories, and cannot com

However, to leave dissertation behind me, and to resume the thread of my narrative, an incident, which about this period impressed me even more profoundly than my introduction to a royal presence, was my first visit to London.

plain if he should be roundly accused of doing that which he has taken pains to prove himself capable of doing. This way of arguing might be applied with fatal effect to the Duc de Lauzun's " Memoirs," supposing them written with a view to publication. But, by possibility, that was not the case. The Duc de L. terminated his profligate life, as is well known, on the scaffold, during the storms of the French Revolution; and nothing in his whole career won him so much credit as the way in which he closed it; for he went to his death with a romantic carelessness, and even gaiety of demeanour. His "Memoirs" were not published by himself: the publication was posthumous; and by whom authorised, or for what purpose, is not exactly known. Probably the manuscript fell into mercenary hands, and was published merely on a speculation of pecuniary gain. From some passages, however, I cannot but infer that the writer did not mean to bring it before the public, but wrote it rather as a series of private memoranda, to aid his own recollection of circumstances and dates. The Duc de Lauzun's account of his intrigue with Lady Sarah goes so far as to allege that he rode down in disguise, from London to Sir Charles B.'s country seat, agreeably to a previous assignation, and that he was admitted by that lady's confidential attendant, through a back staircase, at the time when Sir Charles (a foxhunter, but a man of the highest breeding and fashion) was himself at home, and occupied in the duties of hospitality.

CHAPTER VIII

THE NATION OF LONDON 1

It was a most heavenly day in May of this year (1800) when I first beheld and first entered this mighty wilderness, the city-no! not the city, but the nation-of London. Often since then, at distances of two and three hundred miles or more from this colossal emporium of men, wealth, arts, and intellectual power, have I felt the sublime expression of her enormous magnitude in one simple form of ordinary occurrence-viz., in the vast droves of cattle, suppose upon the great north roads, all with their heads directed to London, and expounding the size of the attracting body, together with the force of its attractive power, by the never-ending succession of these droves, and the remoteness from the capital of the lines upon which they were moving. A suction so powerful, felt along radii so vast, and a consciousness, at the same time, that upon other radii still more vast, both by land and by sea, the same suction is operating, night and day, summer and winter, and hurrying for ever into one centre the infinite means needed for her infinite purposes, and the endless tributes to the skill or to the luxury of her endless population, crowds the imagination with a pomp to which there is nothing corresponding upon this planet, either amongst the things that have been, or the things that are.

1 De Quincey has now reached the second of his autobiographical articles in Tait's Magazine, published in March 1834; and the present chapter is mainly a reproduction of that article, but with additions and changes, and with a special title invented for it.-M.

Or, if any exception there is, it must be sought in ancient Rome.1 We, upon this occasion, were in an open carriage,

1 "Ancient Rome" :-Vast, however, as the London is of this day, I incline to think that it is below the Rome of Trajan. It has long been a settled opinion among scholars that the computations of Lipsius on this point were prodigiously overcharged; and formerly I shared in that belief. But closer study of the question, and a laborious collation of the different data (for any single record, independently considered, can here establish nothing), have satisfied me that Lipsius was nearer the truth than his critics; and that the Roman population of every class-slaves, aliens, peoples of the suburbs, included-lay between four and six millions: in which case the London of 1833, which counts more than a million and a-half, but less than two millions [Note.-Our present London of 1853 counts two millions, plus as many thousands as there are days in the year.], may be taken κата πλатоs, as lying between one-fourth and one-third of Rome. To discuss this question thoroughly would require a separate memoir, for which, after all, there are not sufficient materials: meantime I will make this remark :-That the ordinary computations of a million, or a million and a-quarter, derived from the surviving accounts of the different "regions," apply to Rome within the Pomærium, and are, therefore, no more valid for the total Rome of Trajan's time, stretching so many miles beyond it, than the bills of mortality for what is technically "London within the walls can serve at this day as a base for estimating the population of that total London which we mean and presume in our daily conversation. Secondly, even for the Rome within these limits the computations are not commensurate, by not allowing for the prodigious height of the houses in Rome, which much transcended that of modern cities. On this last point, I will translate a remarkable sentence from the Greek rhetorician Aristides [Note.Aelius Aristides, Greek by his birth, who flourished in the time of the Antonines]; to some readers it will be new and interesting:"And, as oftentimes we see that a man who greatly excels others in bulk and strength is not content with any display, however ostentatious, of his powers, short of that where he is exhibited 'surmounting himself with a pyramid of other men, one set standing upon the shoulders of another; so also this city, stretching forth her foundations over areas so vast, is yet not satisfied with those superficial dimensions; that contents her not; but upon one city rearing another of corresponding proportions, and upon that another, pile resting upon pile, houses overlaying houses, in aerial succession; so, and by similar steps, she achieves a character of architecture justifying, as it were, the very promise of her name; and with reference to that name, and its Grecian meaning, we may say, that here nothing meets our eyes in any direction, but mere Rome! Rome!" [Note.-This word 'Pwμn (Romé), on which the rhetorician plays, is the common Greek term for strength.] "And hence," says Aristides, "I derive the following conclusion that if any one, decomposing this series of strata, were disposed to unshell, as it were, this existing Rome from its present