OR,

THE BANKER'S SON.

A NOVEL.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

LONDON:

R. BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET.

M.DCCC.XXXVIII.

456.

MELTON DE MOWBRAY;

OR, THE

BANKER'S SON.

CHAPTER I.

ST. JAMES'S STREET IN 1791.

'Oh, the days when I was young !”—Old Song.

SINCE the date to which our heading refers, great and signal changes have occurred in the paths of fashion. M'Adam, in his mud-boots, has advanced to the threshold of the court; granite has crumbled into dust at his uplifted hand. Swallow Street, as the song says, has been swallowed up; swamps have been drained to dry ground; five flat fields have

VOL. I.

B

been cropped with places, streets, and squares; and "the King's Road" has, very properly, led the way to a new court-end of the town. St. James's Street itself, though it stands where it did, has grown so prodigiously tall, has so improved in its features, that it lately proved fatal to an antiquarian Conservative, who, returning from the Celestial Empire, passed, like a mourner, through overwhelming improvements, till, coming to this timehallowed spot, he sank in despair, and bit the dust of M'Adam.

Nevertheless, it must be allowed that the sun used to shine as brightly in the days gone by as now. If Hoby, the once leviathan, has been shadowed by a greater monster of the deep; if the guardsmen have been squeezed to a thread-paper; if hotels, worthy of the capital, look with contempt upon the retiring charms of the Thatched House;" if banking-shops, like palaces, have risen from the earth; if, in short, all has been changed for the better, except the red brick hospital which Britons have converted to a palace for the monarch of England; if, with this melan

choly exception, St. James's Street has become more worthy of its courtly name, the heavenly powers pursue their given course as they did, neither dimmed nor dazzled by the atoms which the pride of man has piled one upon the other.

It was a bright, clear, sunshiny day, in the month of June. A long line of dirty, lumbering straw-bottoms held their appointed stand in the centre of the street. Cabs were undreamed of then; nay, there was not so much as a chariot to enliven the rank, for these better halves had not, as yet, received the sanction of a government, which then dreamed as little of reform as the possibility of travelling thirty miles an hour by steam. The coachies, one and all, had vacated their seats, and, in compliment to their goddess of plenty, were spending the produce of darker days in smoke and heavy wet: one solitary, ragged man, with his brazen order dangling from his neck, an apron cut out of an old sack, short and mystic as a freemason's, a pull of hay under one arm, and a slender portion in one hand, hobbled from coach to