I don't know in all this miserable world a more miserable spectacle than that of a young
fellow of five or six and forty. The British army, that nursery of valour, turns out many of
the young fellows I mean: who, having flaunted in dragoon uniforms from seventeen to
six-and-thirty; having bought, sold, or swapped during that period some two hundred
horses; having played, say, fifteen thousand games at billiards; having drunk some six
thousand bottles of wine; having consumed a reasonable number of Nugee coats, split
many dozen pairs of high-heeled Hoby boots, and read the newspaper and the army-list
duly, retire from the service when they have attained their eighth lustre, and saunter
through the world, trailing from London to Cheltenham, and from Boulogne to Paris, and
from Paris to Baden, their idleness, their ill-health, and their ennui. "In the morning of
youth," and when seen along with whole troops of their companions, these flowers look
gaudy and brilliant enough; but there is no object more dismal than one of them alone,
and in its autumnal, or seedy state. My friend, Captain Popjoy, is one who has arrived at
this condition, and whom everybody knows by his title of Father Pop. A kinder, simpler,
more empty-headed fellow does not exist. He is forty-seven years old, and appears a
young, good-looking man of sixty. At the time of the Army of Occupation he really was
as good-looking a man as any in the Dragoons. He now uses all sorts of stratagems to
cover the bald place on his head, by combing certain thin grey sidelocks over it. He has,
in revenge, a pair of enormous moustaches, which he dyes of the richest blue-black. His
nose is a good deal larger and redder than it used to be; his eyelids have grown flat and
heavy; and a little pair of red, watery eyeballs float in the midst of them: it seems as if
the light which was once in those sickly green pupils had extravasated into the white
part of the eye. If Pop's legs are not so firm and muscular as they used to be in those
days when he took such leaps into White's buckskins, in revenge his waist is much
larger. He wears a very good coat, however, and a waistband, which he lets out after
dinner. Before ladies he blushes, and is as silent as a schoolboy. He calls them "modest
women." His society is chiefly among young lads belonging to his former profession. He
knows the best wine to be had at each tavern or cafe, and the waiters treat him with
much respectful familiarity. He knows the names of every one of them; and shouts out,
"Send Markwell here!" or, "Tell Cuttriss to give us a bottle of the yellow seal!" or, "Dizzy
voo, Monsure Borrel, noo donny shampang frappy," etc. He always makes the salad or
the punch, and dines out three hundred days in the year: the other days you see him in
a two-franc eating-house at Paris, or prowling about Rupert Street, or St. Martin's Court,
where you get a capital cut of meat for eightpence. He has decent lodgings and
scrupulously clean linen; his animal functions are still tolerably well preserved, his
spiritual have evaporated long since; he sleeps well, has no conscience, believes
himself to be a respectable fellow, and is tolerably happy on the days when he is asked
out to dinner.
