defunct Alfred were quarrelling among themselves.
The United Service only admitted officers
of high grade. What remained, then, for the
young or middle-aged warriors but Gamridge's?

Gamridge's was not a club; its coffee-room
was open to all comers; yet the character of
its frequenters was so strongly marked, that
an outsider rarely, if ever, ventured to set
foot within the mysterious precincts. A bagman
who presumed to enter Gamridge's would
have had a bad time of it. There would have
been wailing in Lancashire, if a Manchester
man had so far forgotten himself as to intrude,
uninvited, on the Gamridgean
exclusiveness. In its distinctive typification, and
its invisible but impassable barriers, Gamridge's
resembled one of the old coffee-houses of
the preceding century. They, too, were open
to all; yet you seldom found any but merchants
at Garraway's or Jonathan's, soldiers at the
Crown in Whitehall, gamesters at Sam's in
St. James's-street, country squires at the Star
and Garter in Pall Mall, Jacobites at the Harp
at Cornhill, booksellers' hacks at the Devil in
Fleet-street, lawyers at the Cock, and publishers
at the Ball in Long-acre.

There had never, in the memory of the
oldest inhabitant of the parish, been a Gamridge.
"Who he was, if ever he were at all, there is no
knowing. In '36 the landlord— landlady, rather
— was Mrs. Vash: a handsome portly widow,
who wore bishop's sleeves, and a multitude of
ribbons in her cap. She had many daughters,
whom she kept scrupulously at boarding-school
to preserve them from the perils of Gamridge's;
for, if the "wild prince" was dead "Poins" was
about, wilder than ever. Mrs. Vash was a
woman of the world. A few, a very few, of
her oldest customers—old gentlemen who had
been so long and so consistently raking about
town that they seemed, on the principle of
extremes meeting, almost steady—were sometimes
admitted to the luxurious privacy of Mrs.
Vash's bar-parlour. She was an excellent judge
of port wine, and, being a generous hostess,
would occasionally treat some of her prime
favourites to a bottle with a peculiar tawny seal.
In the coffee-room Mrs. Vash tolerated cigars,
and carefully charged ninepence apiece for them.
She was equally careful to charge exorbitant
prices for every article consumed. You might
give a dinner now-a-days at the Rag, for what a
breakfast cost at Gamridge's.

The politics of Gamridge's were High Tory
in tone. The true blue patrician class had lost
much power and influence by Catholic Emancipation
and the Reform Bill, and threw themselves
for a change into dissipation. Liberal Conservatives
had not yet perked up into existence.
Among the Whigs and Radicals it was held to be
the orthodox thing, just then, to be steady and
sober, to bring in moral acts of parliament, to
attend lectures at the Royal Institution. The
Tories sneered contemptuously at education and
morality. They were staunch churchmen, but in
the "flying buttress" sense, like Lord Eldon,
supporting the sacred edifice from the outside.
They called the London University "Stinkomalee,"
or the "Gower-street Pig and Whistle."
They held schools where the birch was not in daily
use, as the vilest hotbeds of sedition, and were
careful to send their children to seminaries where
they knew they would have plenty of flogging in
the good old Tory style. The society at Gamridge's
was a permanent protest against the
Penny Magazine, and the steam engine, and the
pursuit of knowledge under difficulties, and the
educational whimsies of your Broughams,
Benthams, Faradays, De Morgans, and compeers.
Nothing useful, save eating and drinking, was
ever attempted at Gamridge's; and even those
elementary functions were performed in the
manner most calculated to confer the least
amount of benefit on the human frame. The
guests breakfasted at three in the afternoon, and
dined at midnight. Gas blazed in the coffee-
room at noon, and knocked-up roués went to bed
at tea-time. There were many white-faced
waiters who never seemed to go to bed at all,
and to like this perpetual insomnolence. Pale
ale was unknown in England then, but the
popping of corks from bottles of mineral waters
was audible all day long. Dice, only, Mrs. Vash
rigidly refused to wink at. "If gentlemen, who
were gentlemen," she remarked, "wanted to call
a main, they must do it in the parish of St.
James's, and not in the parish of St. George's."
Mrs. Vash was one of the old school, and liked
to see things done in their proper places.

It was a vicious time, and yet somewhat of
the patriarchal element remained. Plebeian
dissipation was confined to the youngsters. The
old gentlemen went to the Deuce, mounted on
steady ambling cobs. A new race of rakes drove
them gradually from the coffee-room at
Gamridge's, and Mrs. Vash's back parlour, where
they piped disparagement of the rapscallion age
over their port with the tawny seal. Thence by
slow degrees they subsided into Pump-street,
and to Bath, and Cheltenham, and Fogeydom, and
went home to bed, and fell paralytic, and so died.

Mr. Francis Blunt walked into Gamridge's at
about a quarter to one in the morning, with a
light tight-fitting overcoat buttoned over him,
swinging his cane, and looking, on the whole, "as
fresh as paint." The coarseness of the simile may
find an excuse in its literal fidelity. A fresh pair
of lemon-coloured kid gloves decorated his hands,
the many rings bulging from beneath the soft
leather. His whiskers had been rearranged—
perhaps those ornaments and his hair were not
strangers to a recent touch from the curling-
irons, for there were hairdressers in the Quadrant
who kept open till past midnight for the behoof
of exquisites such as he—his clothes had been
brushed, his whole exterior spruced and polished
up. He had passed a hard day, but he was ready
to begin a night as hard.

There was nothing particular about the
exterior of Gamridge's. It was a George-the-