She contrived to make herself useful to some of the haute vôlée of those early times, and so was handed down to their descendants of the present day as a sort of oral tradition, and, the ornamental being impossible, the useful still continued; for this objet non charmant was Lady Gorgon, the most indefatigable match-maker, or match-marrer in London, according as she was retained on either side; and where there were no matches to be made, and they were already marred beyond her powers of meddling, she was equally ready to undertake, and clever in executing, any other little odd job in the way of helping on a profligate husband, provided he were rich and well up in the world, and forging a lie or disseminating a calumny about his victim wife; and much of this honorable sort of secret service had she rendered to her friend and in every way worthy compère, Sir Janus Allpuff. She and her sister had both succeeded, late in life, in prevailing upon two be-knighted apothecaries to marry them, and on one occasion, when the two knights of the pestle were abroad with their perpetual blisters, it used to be said in Paris, "Those poor men cannot help being apothecaries, but they really should not drag their drugs about with them." Having given this slight sketch of Lady Gorgon's antecedents, it is needless to say that she was parvenue to her very crooked back-bone, and lived upon lords and ladies, and by them too, for the British Government, ever ready to mark its gratitude for services of a particular sort, had bestowed a pension of some hundreds a-year upon her. But it was not too much, all things considered, for, to parody the great Condé's un sou par victoire, it was not, though it appeared a great deal to the uninitiated, in reality much more than a halfpenny a job. But as the Duke of Twilglenon had just arrived, looking more ruffianly even and swellmobbish than usual, it was of course necessary for Lady Gorgon to drop the gouty old Lord Celendon, as a minor prey, and join his Grace (?), Mr. Jericho Jabber, Sir Janus Allpuff, and that clique, to whom she was flatterer in chief. Truly says Tacitus, "pessinum genus inimicorum laudantes,” while the proverb asserts that "Flattery is the food of fools," which is rather too invidious toward the poor fools, as your clever knaves, your hangers-on to popularity, your runners after the world's great shadows and bubbles, your despisers of character and seekers of reputation (?), feed far more largely on this garbage than your poor, simple fool; and, like the Styrian peasants, who take graduated doses of arsenic to improve the freshness and sheen of their appearance, either would die if the poison ceased to be administered; and there are none so susceptible of flattery as those who pique themselves upon being flatteryproof. Of this Shakespear (who, as Mr. Phippen justly observed, knew everything) was so fully aware that he makes Decius, in the play of Julius Cæsar in the conspiracy scene, answer Cassius, who doubts whether they shall be able to persuade Cæsar to come forth to the Capitol that day

never fear that;
I can o'ersway him, for he loves to hear
That unicorn may be betray'd with trees,
And bears with glasses, elephants holes,
Lions with toils, and man with flattery:
But when I tell him he hates flatterers,
He says he does, being then most flattered."

But where flattery, which is the legitimate tool of the hireling and the parasite, becomes indeed a thing to grieve and to wonder at is, when the great and noble stoop to the degradation of employing it. Passing over more modern instances, who, without a feeling of deep regret and humiliation at belonging to a species that can so prostitute the Promethean spark they possess above other animals, can read that master-piece of human eloquence, as it will for ever remain-the oration of Cicero, addressed to Cæsar on the behalf of Marcellus-and not be moved also with astonishment that the transcendent talents centred in the great patriot and defender of the liberty of the people of Rome should not only bend before and supplicate the invader of that liberty, but should also grovel down into flattering him with the same lips that had destroyed Cataline?

66

But this certainly is irrelevant to such animaculæ as my Lady Gorgon, who far more resembled the ichneumon, which travellers tell us is the parasite of the crocodile, its business being to clean its master's teeth (a somewhat dirty job truly); but then its perquisites are the carnage it finds there. So leaving Lady Gorgon among her crocodiles, like an allegory on the banks of the Nile," and passing over the other groups distributed about the room, who were merely ladies and gentlemen, and therefore had nothing to particularly distinguish them in the present day, which is one of high intellect and profound science, wherein even the lowest acts of blackguardism must be treated intellectually, and the blackest crime perpetrated scientifically-for as The Times truly observed, touching the Rugeley and Darlington poisonings, "If the thing is to be done, it must be done scientifically; the darkest deed of the blindest passion must be accomplished with the patience and clearsightedness of the coldest intellect," thus safely eschewing the devil's highway of open crime and vulgar murder; but, as we before said, we will leave the ichneumon with her crocodiles en rôle de cure-dent, and go down into the hall again to escort Mr. Phippen up-stairs, as he may be shy.

CHAPTER XIX.

WHERE, AMONG MANY GREAT (?) MEN, MR. PHIPPEN MEETS WITH A GENTLEMAN; AND AS HE (MR. PHIPPEN) RUBS UP SOME ANTIQUE REMINISCENCES OF THE CONSULATE AND THE EMPIRE, HE FINDS THAT OLD STORIES, LIKE OLD FASHIONS, COME INTO VOGUE AGAIN, IF KEPT SUFFICIENTLY LONG; SO THAT, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, HE ACQUITS HIMSELF NON CE MALE, CONSIDERING THAT IT IS HIS DEBUT IN HIGH LIFE, EITHER ABOVE OR BELOW' STAIRS.

JUST as Mr. Phippen arrived at Dunnington House a cab drove up, and two men got out. One was a literary celebrity, and justly deserved to be such, as far as his very clever novels went; but, in gratitude to the ignorance and inanity of the Matrons and Misses of the fashionable world, of whom he was becoming l'enfant chèri, he had recently given a series of lectures upon the celebrities of the eighteenth century, which, had he calculated one whit less truly upon the profound and extensive ignorance of his audience, would, from their vapidity and total absence of anything like new light thrown upon the thread-bare matter he had selected, have been an insult to that modicum of understanding, which even lords and ladies are allowed by courtesy. However, he had not reckoned without his host, and the mobs of the élite which attended these lectures thought them all very fine, and felt much edified at being, for the first time, apprised of what every decently-educated child of twelve years old ought to know; and so Mr. Thrashaway, the lecturer, became more popular than ever-a fait accompli which had procured him the additional honor (?) of being patronized by his present companion, a Mr. Abner Haystack, a gentleman of Jewish extraction and appearance, not handsome, nor even like the King of Persia, except in name, but he was a great linguist, and really a clever man, so that he might have taken his stand upon his own ground, and that a high one; but he preferred being the veriest tuft-hunter in London, a sort of appendix to the peerage, and infester of great houses; and this it was, perhaps, which gave to his nearly grey and very bushy hair a faux air of flunkeyism, as if it had "caught the powder living as it flew! During their drive to Dunnington House, he had been kindly initiating his infinitely cleverer companion into the superfineities of the crême de la crême of society, of which, as he had passed his whole life in skimming, he naturally fancied himself "quite the cheese!" But to prove how completely he was of the times, thrifty, in his strictures upon savoir vivre he had like all the great (?) personages of the present

day, kept a sharp look out as to his sous, and so had proposed to his companion that they should divide the cab-fare; for every soul of this generation, whether old or young, rich or poor, a Mecenas or a mendicant, seems thoroughly impressed with one of the few great truths that Göthe, that Jupiter Tonans of the modern Pantheistic school of cold-blooded materialism, ever uttered, namely, that

"With neither purse nor scrip, thou lightly climb'st the hill;

But the bag weighed down with riches is a lighter burden still." Now Mr. Thrashaway, who had borne with quiet unction the elegant extracts from Mr. Abner Haystack's diptycha of living and defunct magnates, determined to bide his time for illustrating Mrs. Primrose's favourite proverb, touching the impossibility of converting the aural organ of a certain animal into a velvet receptacle for money, and so take his revenge of the elegant Abner. And that time was now come; for before the assembled legion of powdered and unpowdered satellites of "that great Orion," Sir Titaniferous Thompson's house, the relentless Thrashaway walked up to the superfine Haystack, without any symptom of that love proverbially said to exist between ancient cows and the reality of his bucolic name, and said, in an audible voice and with an air savouring far more of the Seven Dials than of the seven Dukes which Mr. Haystack had been pouring out upon him like the seven vials in the Revelations during their drive

"I tell you what, Haystack, I'll toss you for the cab-fare."

Poor Haystack! Had he been tossed by a bull, he could not have looked more aghast! But there was nothing for it but philosophy, and he had not translated so much German in vain ; and so recalling Göthe's epigram of

66 How, when and where? No oracles reply;

Restrain thyself to since, and ask not for the why ?”

And since thus it was that Mr. Thrashaway had so committed himself, and compromised him, before the flunkey-ocracy of the great parvenu's establishment, the elegant Abner had only to pass on and ascend the velvet-covered stairs with as much dignity in his deportment as if he had been really the King of Persia, instead of only his namesake. Mr. Thrashaway followed, enjoying his discomfiture, while from a study off the hall issued three more guests, one of whom was the identical tropical-looking gentleman who had got into the train with Mrs. Penrhyn and Sir Gregory Kempenfelt, in their way down to Baron's Court; this personage rejoiced in the name of Hebblethwaite. The other two were of so ordinary an appearance as not to need a description;-in fact, they not only looked like Joneses and Smiths, but they were Jones and Smith, for those were their respective names. Having allowed all these to precede him, so that he might be the very last, Mr. Phip

pen followed the groom of the chambers upstairs, who, though he had twice enquired the name of that unknown personage, was not able, or affected not to be able, to catch it, so that after all, that worthy man, who was quite content with his own good name, was announced by the better known and more aristocratic one of "Mr. Phipps, my lady."

Whereupon Lady Georgiana, having received her cue, and anxious to give it to her guests, rose, and greeted the last arrival with the most empressée civility. Indeed, had Mr. Phippen thought about it (which he did not), he could not but have remarked that, instead of that super-abundance of bad manners so rife in "good" (?) society, which generally produces for every unknown face an impertinent stare, legibly demanding "Who on earth are you?" there was, on the contrary, a deferential sort of falling back, and a slight pause in the tesselations of conversation going on about the room, as if he had been actually some Prince of Saxe Swillandsmokeum, with a revenue of two whole hundreds a year. The fact was, for their very souls they could not do less, for Sir Titaniferous had, as a preliminary measure, bestowed six millions on him, being just three more than he actually possessed; but this increase of riches Mr. Phippen ignored, and therefore had no merit in not setting his heart upon them, though it might have jarred on his self-love (had he had any) to have known why his advent was so very successful! Sir Titaniferous followed in Lady Georgiana's wake, making him a speech for his kindness in coming to them, and then, turning to his aunt, said—

"Lady De Baskerville, allow me to present our good friend, Mr. Phippen, to you."

The greatlady immediately rose, the brilliants on her neck emitting additional scintillations, it might be from the accelerated pulsation of her heart, in which prudence and pride were encountering in a gladiatorial struggle; but, the former coming off the victor, as it always does in minds well regulated by the world's chronometer, she held out one of her white and sparkling hands to the Samaritan of Threadneedle-street, and said how happy she was to have the pleasure of making Mr. Phippen's acquaintance.

But whether it was that Mr. Phippen was completely overpowered and taken aback by this unexpected honor-or whether, with a twinge of Threadneedle-street, he did not care for her ladyship's hand without her seal, we cannot pretend to say; but certain it is that, with a total absence of the gallantry that was natural, and the courtesy that was habitual to him, he stood bowing profoundly all the while, leaving Lady De Baskerville's proffered hand in abeyance and never once attempting to take it. But, as his face at first became very red and then suddenly livid, we can only suppose that the honor overpowered him, and that he avoided purposely taking the fair hand extended to him, from being of my