within the range of this really alluring and
appetising description. A portion of the
journal kept by the late Thomas Raikes,
Esquire, the title-page of these four garrulous
volumes announces their contents to be
Thomas Raikes, Esquire, proving to be
himself—before we have penetrated very far into
his lucubrations—what may be designated
a most amiable, old Toryfied Prig, and an
extremely self-contented and self-important
Chatterbox. Consisting, as it does, of merely
a portion of his journal—extending from
eighteen hundred and thirty-one to eighteen
hundred and forty-seven—the work
recently issued from the press, under this
somewhat unattractive title, will be found
to extend over four volumes of really
interesting, social, and political
reminiscences. Entertaining they are, for a
reason or two hereupon to be immediately
specified. The production being altogether
the counterpart presentment of the
individual who penned it—to wit, Thomas Raikes,
Esquire. The production itself never tiring
by the way of reminding us that he was
Esquire—T. Raikes, Esq., figuring away on
every leaf—T. Raikes, Esq., being lettered
in gold upon the back of the volume, and
Thomas Raikes, Esquire, in full, being
engraved with a flourish under the author's
portrait, prefixed to volume one, by way of
frontispiece. This wonderful portrait was
taken, one might suppose, from one of Deighton's
full-length profile miniatures. What a
characteristic sketch of the man it
manifestly is!—as characteristic as his own diary,
and that surely is his alter ego, his other self,
his ghostly adumbration. Looking at the
portrait and at the journal, we know at once
what sort of a man this was; we catch the
notion of him perfectly. A Spence, maundering
about continually, without a Pope. A
Boswell never stumbling upon his Johnson,
but ever and ever self-conscious, as though
he stood always in the midst of a cluster of
cheval-glasses, full of his own reflections!
An Evelyn, whose Sylva had (only semi-
officially) something or other to do with the
woods and forests. Briefly and more
accurately—Mr. Pepys's shadow modernised.

Examining the man more carefully in his
picture as well as in his journal, it is amusing
to recognise what we may venture
to style a kind of Peel-Turveydrop
in this comedy double of the incarnation
of Deportment. A gentleman, in
fact, bearing such a strong family likeness
to that particular prototype, that, looking
at his well-strapped and well-
buttoned figure, one might, here again, almost
expect to see "creases in the whites of his
eyes" when he bowed! It is easy enough
even to imagine the gait of the man when he
walked, to see him tumbling over the pavement
of St. James's and Piccadilly, with a
heavy-go-light kind of ambling pace, as
though his corns were wadded. The very
neckcloth lapped about his throat appears to
have been put on as tenderly as if it were a
poultice, and though evidently one who, in
his younger days, must, without doubt, have
been what was variously designated in those
times a blood, a buck, or a dandy,
subordinating coxcombry to comfort that,
despite all that still tightly-fitting, fashionable
raiment, he seems at last to have
vindicated his title in a more literal
sense to the modern appellation of the brotherhood,
by an amplitude of girth decidedly
more compatible than any wasp-like waist
with the enjoyment of a fare, lusciously
alternating between truffles and ortolans. Yet,
after all, this personage was not, in truth, as
one might have been disposed to imagine
from his air of innate ton, any descendant of
the Courtenays, any scion of a patrician
house, tracing back his lineage to the Tudors
or Plantagenets, one who, if Italian, might
have claimed kindred with the Colonnas, if
Spanish, with the Medina-Sidonias, or if
French, with the Grammonts and the
Montmorencies.

Excellent, honest Mr. Thomas Raikes,
was in reality the eldest son of a wealthy
and respected merchant of our good city of
London, as the preface to his son's diary tells
us, "a personal friend of Mr. Pitt and Mr.
Wilberforce," and descended from an ancient
family of Yorkshire. Nevertheless, if Thomas
Raikes, Esquire, were not himself of noble
origin, one can only picture him (after reading
this journal of his recollections) as one
who had somehow contrived to soar into
such social altitudes that he seems throughout
the four volumes to be floating in the
seventh heaven of fashion—wandering at
large in the rarefied empyrean of what is
emphatically termed society—hanging on
by his eyelashes, as the saying is, to
the skirts of the aristocracy. Running our
glance over his pages, don't we find that the
Duke of Wellington was his "very faithfully?"
That he not only corresponded with the Duke
of York, but that he was even familiarly the
"Dear Raikes" of his royal highness? That
the Royal Duchess (of York) signed herself his
friend and servant very affectionately, "votre
tres affectionnée amie et servante?" He was
manifestly, in truth, a pleasant companion, a
good listener, an agreeable retailer of an
anecdote. He was obviously also a man
whose mind was so intensely flavoured
with the atmosphere of Pall Mall, that he
might have been said to be of the clubs,
clubby.

Mr. Raikes was clearly one who dearly
loved a gossip. He had a finger for every
man's button-hole. He was intrinsically by
nature, what the Parisians call a flâneur, a
saunterer about the west-end causeways—in
the height of the season—in the pick of the
afternoon. As a conversationalist he did, by
word of mouth, for love, what the news-
writers of Queen Anne's time did by scrawls