fully the servants may clean, and alter, and
arrange it, the room loses its respectability
again, and gets slovenly and unpresentable the
moment their backs are turned. Sir John himself,
the tidiest man in existence, has given up
all hope of reforming it. He peeps in occasionally,
and sighs and shakes his head, and puts a
chair in its place, and straightens a print on the
wall, and looks about him at the general litter
and confusion, and gives it up and goes out
again. He is a rigid man and a resolute in the
matter of order, and has his way all over the
rest of the house—but the Bachelor Bedroom
is too much for him.

The first bachelor who inhabited the room
when I began to be a guest at Coolcup House,
was Mr. Bigg. Mr. Bigg is, in the strictest
sense of the word, what you call a fine man. He
stands over six feet, is rather more than stout
enough for his height, holds his head up nobly,
and dresses in a style of mingled gaiety and
grandeur which impresses everybody. The
morning shirts of Mr. Bigg are of so large a
pattern that nobody but his haberdasher knows
what that pattern really is. You see a bit of it
on one side of his collar which looks square, and
a bit of it on the other side which looks round.
It goes up his arm on one of his wristbands, and
down his arm on the other. Men who have
seen his shirts off (if such a statement may be
permitted), and scattered loosely, to Sir John's
horror, over all the chairs in the Bedroom, have
been questioned, and have not been found able to
state that their eyes ever followed out the
patterns of any one of them fairly to the end.
In the matter of beautiful and expensive clothing
for the neck Mr. Bigg is simply inexhaustible.
Every morning he appears at breakfast in a fresh
scarf, and taps his egg magnificently with a
daily blaze of new colour glowing on his capacious
chest to charm the eyes of the young
ladies who sit opposite to him. All the other
component parts of Mr. Bigg's costume are of
an equally grand and attractive kind, and are set
off by Mr. Bigg's enviable figure to equal advantage.
Outside the Bachelor Bedroom he is
altogether an irreproachable character in the
article of dress. Outside the Bachelor Bedroom,
he is essentially a man of the world, who can be
thoroughly depended on to perform any part
allotted to him in any society assembled at
Coolcup House; who has lived among all ranks
and sorts of people; who has filled a public
situation with great breadth and dignity, and has
sat at table with crowned heads, and played his
part there with distinction; who can talk of
these experiences, and of others akin to them,
with curious fluency and ease, and can shift
about to other subjects, and pass the bottle, and
carve, and draw out modest people, and take all
other social responsibilities on Ins own shoulders
complacently, at the largest and dreariest county
dinner party that Sir John, to his own great discomfiture,
can be obliged to give. Such is Mr.
Bigg in the society of the house, when the door
of the Bachelor Bedroom has closed behind
him.

But what is Mr. Bigg, when he has courteously
wished the ladies good night, when he
has secretly summoned the footman with the
surreptitious tray, and when he has deluded the
unprincipled married men of the party into
having half an hour's cozy chat with him before
they go up-stairs? Another being—a being
unknown to the ladies, and unsuspected by the
respectable guests. Inside the Bedroom, the
outward aspect of Mr. Bigg changes as if by
magic; and a kind of gorgeous slovenliness pervades
him from top to toe. Buttons which have
rigidly restrained him within distinct physical
boundaries, slip exhausted out of their button-holes;
and the figure of Mr. Bigg suddenly
expands and asserts itself for the first time as a
protuberant fact. His neckcloth flies on to the
nearest chair, his rigid shirt-collar yawns open,
his wiry under-whiskers ooze multitudinously
into view, his coat, waistcoat, and braces drop off
his shoulders. If the two young ladies who
sleep in the room above, and who most unreasonably
complain of the ceaseless nocturnal
croaking and growling of voices in the Bachelor
Bedroom, could look down through the ceiling
now, they would not know Mr. Bigg again, and
would suspect that a dissipated artisan had intruded
himself into Sir John's house.

In the same way, the company who have sat
in Mr. Bigg's neighbourhood at the dinner-table
at six o'clock, would find it impossible to recognise
his conversation at midnight. Outside the
Bachelor Bedroom, if his talk has shown him to
be anything at all, it has shown him to be the
exact reverse of an enthusiast. Inside the
Bachelor Bedroom, after all due attention has
been paid to the cigar-box and the footman's tray,
it becomes unaccountably manifest to everybody
that Mr. Bigg is, after all, a fanatical character,
a man possessed of one fixed idea. Then, and
then only, does he mysteriously confide to his
fellow revellers that he is the one remarkable
man in Great Britain who has discovered the
real authorship of Junius's Letters. In the
general society of the house, nobody ever hears
him refer to the subject; nobody ever suspects
that he takes more than the most ordinary interest
in literary matters. In the select society
of the Bedroom, inspired by the surreptitious
tray and the midnight secrecy, wrapped in clouds
of tobacco smoke, and freed from the restraint
of his own magnificent garments, the truth flies
out of Mr. Bigg, and the authorship of Junius's
Letters becomes the one dreary subject which
this otherwise variously gifted man persists in
dilating on for hours together. But for the
Bachelor Bedroom nobody alive would ever have
discovered that the true key to unlock Mr.
Bigg's character is Junius. If the subject is
referred to the next day by his companions of
the night, he declines to notice it; but, once in
the Bedroom again, he takes it up briskly, as if
the attempted reference to it had been made but
the moment before. The last time I saw him was
in the Bachelor Bedroom. It was three o'clock
in the morning; two tumblers were broken;
half a lemon was in the soap-dish, and the soap