QUITE ALONE.

BOOK THE FIRST: CHILDHOOD.
CHAPTER VII. WHEN WILLIAM THE FOURTH WAS KING.

The epoch, there was no denying it, was a
wild and dissolute one. The imprint of the
Regent's cloven foot had not yet worn away.
A man was upon the throne. He made a
decorous king enough in his old age, mainly through
the influence of a pious and admirable wife; but
his youth had been the converse of reputable.
The sons of George the Third had not contributed
in any great degree to the elevation of
the moral tone of the country.  The trial of
Queen Caroline, and the private life of George
the Fourth, had done a good deal towards
depraving the national manners.  There were no
young princesses save one, the Hope of
England, whom her good mother kept sedulously
aloof from the polluting atmosphere of the age.
The Duchess of Kent and her daughter went
tranquilly about from watering-place to watering-place,
and gathered shells and weeds upon the
sands, and visited poor people in their
cottages, and sat under evangelical ministers, and
allowed the age to go by, and to be as wild and
dissolute as it chose.  They hoped and waited
for better times, and the better times came
at last, and have continued, and will endure,
we trust.

Party spirit ran high.  We had been on the
verge of a revolution about Catholic Emancipation,
of another about Parliamentary Reform.
Everything was disorganised.  There were
commissions sitting upon everything, with a view to
the abrogation of most things.  Barristers of
seven years' standing, fattened upon the treasures
wrung from the sinecurists, and the pension-
holders of the old Black Book. Commissioners
and inspectors became as great a nuisance and
burden to the country as the clerks of the Pipe
or the Tellers of the Exchequer had been.
Everybody had his theory for regenerating
society, but lacked sincere faith in his own
nostrums; and so, after a while, deserted them.
It was a reign of terror without much blood.
The warfare was mostly one of words and
principles, abusive language being in vogue among
perfectly unscrupulous party-writers. Reverence,
gratitude, decency, had gone to sleep for a while.
O'Connell called Wellington a "stunted
corporal," and Alvanley a "bloated buffoon," and
Disraeli the younger "a lineal descendant of the
impenitent thief." One Cocking had cast
himself into space in a parachute, and, coming into
contact with the earth, was smashed to death.
A crafty Frenchman lured many hundreds of
simpletons into taking tickets for a passage in
his navigable balloon or aerial ship. Then,
timeously, he ran away, and left them with their
tickets, and an empty bag of oiled silk. There
were people who did not believe in steam. There
were others who did believe in it, but held that
locomotives and paddle-steamers were only the
precursors of the end of the world. Meanwhile,
Chat Moss had been drained by Stephenson, and
Brunel was piercing the Thames Tunnel. But
nothing was settled. Nobody knew where
anything was to end. Steam and scepticism and
tractarianism and Murphy's weather almanack,
the abolition of slavery and the labour of children
in factories, lions and tigers at Drury Lane,
and the patents taken away therefrom, and from
Covent Garden too; commutation of tithes and
reform of municipal corporations, charity
commissions and the new Poor-law, chartism,
trades-unionism and the unknown tongues; oceans of
pamphlets; new clubs starting up all over the
West-end; pigtails, knee-breeches and
hair-powder beginning to be laughed at; the
Chancellor jumping up and down on the wool-sack
like a parched pea in a fire-shovel, instead
of gravely doubting and doubting for years, and
working no end of misery and ruin, as Chancellor
Eldon had done: all these things, with Irish
out-rages, colonial discontents and embarrassing
relations with foreign powers (order reigned in Warsaw,
and "Vivent les Polonais!" in Paris meant
the erection of barricades and a tussle between
the blouses and the soldiery), made up a chaotic
whirlwind of sand and pebbles and brickbats
and scraps of paper, the whole accompanied by
a prodigious noise, driving peaceably-minded
people half blind, and half deaf, and
parcel-mad.

Francis Blunt, Esq., and Monsieur Constant,
had left Stockwell shortly after eleven o'clock.
The hackney-coachman had been well paid, and
promised an extra fee for speed; but the era of
rapid Hansoms was yet to come, and it was nearly
midnight when the two jaded horses that drew