cian sage declared that man is but a bubble (Hoμþóλv§ ó äveρwños). Some unlucky hit, and the bubble bursts! Theodore lost his all.

He had now to live by his wits. Necessity begets shrewdness, and the careless in plenty become plotting and calculating in poverty. He had been bred in extravagance, and untrammelled by principle, he brooded in many-hued projects on the future. It became expedient to enter fresh fields of enterprise. His name was to be discarded, and the outward and visible man metamorphosed. With a cunning industry well worthy of him, he hunted out a Polish title, respecting the life or death of the representative of which there was much doubt. It was believed he was alive, but Theodore ascertained that he was dead. He got up the history of the family, stored his mind. with incidents to attest the truth, gained some introductory letters and forged others, then set out for London. His epistolary vouchers were available, and he got into society, and Theodore Millman was henceforth the Count de Puffendoff! Now, being in reduced cir

cumstances, he obscured himself in terra incognita, and this was, as the reader may conjecture, in or near Little Britain. His landlady was avaricious and debased, and at length she became his ally in crime. That little room previously described, became the theatre of villanies which none but a darkened soul could perpetrate. More than one homeless wanderer, with gin-flushed cheeks, and attired in tawdry fashion, would at times in passing by cast an agonizing glance at the scene of her ruin, and mutter a blaspheming curse on the memory of the ruiner! The West-end hells bettered his position; and though he moved to the purlieus of St. James's, yet he retained his hiding-place in the City, and whither he repaired when hunted by duns, or engaged in such transactions as those in which and where we have seen him with Squanderfield and Fitzgerald.

In glancing at the brief histories of these men, certain conclusions, perhaps not wholly unprofitable, might be deduced. A kind of careless, devil-me-care thoughtlessness ou the part of Fitzgerald's predecessors, had

not only affected themselves, the perpetrators of so much folly, but the penalty punished their successors. Under a less distracted and more consistent roof, O'Conner might, as he was endowed bountifully with natural gifts, have been a shining character, and instead of sullying might have reflected honour on his name. Brought up with no precise notions as to his future vocations, and filled with a foolish pride which prevented his condescending to seek his fortunes in less dignified pursuits, he grew up idle and heedless, without resolution, without objects, and, as we have seen, fell unconsciously into the meshes which the iniquitously-designing spread out before him. The feudal prejudices of the father tinctured the mind of the son, and he vaingloriously boasted of his ancestors, when it would have been more to his advantage had he, in the free spirit of an open, undis simulating manliness, determined to be the author of his own claims to respect. His cravenly clinging to the past for recommendatory virtues, exhibited a mind but

little impressed with its own qualifications, and one that sought to fall back on the equivocal support of others, when it should in dignified independence have stood erect on its own basis. The circumstances in which he had been placed, ought, however, to be leniently remembered in his excuse; and he learnt wisdom at the cost of a bitter experience.

Squanderfield was clever, witty, and debased by nature-the natural man had inherently a wrong bias. He was a choice. example of too many belonging to his order in an age now passing rapidly away. In him were a host of those haughty, overbearing, and repulsive characteristics, which at one time threatened to overthrow the aristocracy here, in a manner pretty similar to that which had been the case with the noblesse in France. His merit, if his vaunt be thus misnomered, lay in the chance of his birth. The mere inheritance of nobility was the qualification through which he sued for prestige-this his sole pretension to distinction. He erroneously imagined that the dazzle of

a title would gloze over errors which were at once censurable in others, and he uniformly regarded those beneath him with contemptuous disdain. He either was not, or would not be, prescient enough to perceive that the progress of society, and the general advancement of the people, would not long allow the exclusive prerogatives, nor brook the indecorous hauteur of his class; and if they did not relinquish monopolies, and assume a different front, the wide-spreading flood of intelligence, the influence of industry, and the accumulative power of capital and enterprize, would inevitably coerce them into ungracious concessions and undignified submissions; if such did go further, even to the utter annihilation of oligarchical supremacy.

Happily for this great country, many historic families have stepped forward to make these concessions-they have been actuated by laudable disinterestedness. The coronet and the ermine adorn brows of thoughtfulness, and cover hearts as emulously warm for public good as were ever instanced by Tullys in the forum, or Sydneys on the

VOL. III.

D