"For France?—gracious! how do you know?"
"I hear'd Mr Bristles, which is their confidant, say something about a chay and Dover. In cooss they will go that way to Boulogne."
Oh, Mæcenas! is there no difference between the chef-d'oeuvre of the great Stickleback, and the town of Dover and a post-chaise.
CHAPTER V.
In a week after these events, six or seven gentlemen were gathered round a table in a room very near the skylight in the Minerva chambers. Our former acquaintance, Mr Bristles, whose name shone in white paint above the entrance door, was evidently strongly impressed with the dignity of his position; and as in the pauses of conversation he placed the pen he was using transversely in his mouth, and turned over the pages of various books on the table before him, it will be seen that he presided not at a feast of substantial meat and drink, but at one of those regular "feasts and flows" which the great Mr Pitskiver was in the habit of alluding to, in describing the intellectual treats of which he was so prodigious a glutton.
"What success, Sidsby?" enquired Bristles with a vast appearance of interest.
"None at all," replied the successful dramatist, or, in other words, the long-backed Ticket to whom we were introduced at the commencement of the story. "I have no invitation to dinner yet, and Sophy thinks he has forgotten me."
"That's odd—very odd," mused Mr Bristles, "for I don't know that I ever praised any one half so highly before, not even Stickleback; and the first act was really superb. It took me a whole week to write it."
"But I did not understand some parts of it, and I am afraid I spoiled it in the reading. But Sophy was enchanted with the poem you made me copy."