Page:Highways and Byways in Sussex.djvu/195

 During the town's most fashionable period, which continued for nearly fifty years—say from 1785 to 1835—everyone journeyed thither; and indeed everyone goes to Brighton to-day, although its visitors are now anonymous where of old they were notorious. I believe that Robert Browning is the only eminent Englishman that never visited the town. Perhaps it does little for poets; yet Byron was there as a young man, much in the company of a charming youth with whom he often sailed in the Channel, and who afterwards was discovered to be a girl.

A minor poet, Horace Smith, gives us, in Horace in London, a sprightly picture of the town in 1813, from which we see that the changes between now and then are only in externals:—