Page:Reminisences of Captain Gronow.djvu/212

bound in calf, richly gilt, and illustrated by many cuts."

One of the gay men of the day, named Judge, being incarcerated in the Bench, some one observed he believed it was the first instance of a Judge reaching the bench without being previously called to the bar; to which Alvanley replied, "Many a bad judge has been taken from the bench and placed at the bar." He used to say that Brummell was the only Dandelion that flourished year after year in the hot-bed of the fashionable world: he had taken root. Lions were generally annual, but Brummell was perennial, and he quoted a letter from Walter Scott:—"If you are celebrated for writing verses, or for slicing cucumbers, for being two feet taller, or two feet less, than any other biped, for acting plays when you should be whipped at school, or for attending schools and institutions when you should be preparing for your grave, your notoriety becomes a talisman, an 'open sesame,' which gives way to everything, till you are voted a bore, and discarded for a new plaything." This passage appeared in a letter from Walter Scott to the Earl of Dalkeith, when he himself, Belzoni, Master Betty the Roscius, and old