Very frequent firing with powder will
alarm them so that they will quit the spot, or, at least, be so timid as
to become comparatively little mischievous.
* * * * *
SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.
* * * * *
THE DANDY TRAVELLER.
There is a class of travelling oddities--the dandy _voyageurs_ of
Britain, who, teeming with the proud consciousness of their excellence in
comparison with the rest of human kind, swoln with self-sufficiency, float
like empty bubbles on the water's surface, and who seem as if they would
break and be dissolved by contact with a vulgar touch. They contrive to
swim by means of their air-blown vanity until they come into concussion
with some material object, and are at once reduced to their proper level,
and for ever annihilated. Their country is London; their domicile
Regent-street; thence they would never travel, had they their wills,--not
but they would like to see Paris, and move at Longschamps, or admire its
beauties in an equipage _a D'Aumont_; but the horrors attendant upon
such an enterprise are too formidable gratuitously to be encountered. It
is only when a dip at the Fishmonger's has been rather too often tried, or
Stultz's _billets-doux_ have been repeated with increasing ardour on
the part of the Tailor-lover until he delegates the maintenance of his
_baronial_ purse to some dandy-detesting attorney, that they feel it
expedient to brave the dangers of sea and land, and, unscrewing their
brass spurs, folding up their mustachios in a _port-feuille_, they
hasten them from life and love, and London, and set them down at
Meurice's, the creatures of another element; not less new to all things
around them, than all things there are new to them.
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