iend was a distinguished writer, and a
man of many sterling fine qualities, but with a habit of occasional free
indulgence in coarseness of speech, which, though his earlier life had
made it as easy to acquire as difficult to drop, did always less than
justice to a very manly, honest, and really gentle nature. He had as
much genuinely admirable stuff in him as any favourite hero of Smollett
or Fielding, and I never knew anyone who reminded me of those characters
so much. "It would seem, Mr. Cerjat tells me, that he was, when here,
infinitely worse in his general style of conversation, than
now--sermuchser, as Toodles says, that Cerjat describes himself as
having always been in unspeakable agony when he was at his table, lest
he should forget himself (or remember himself, as I suggested) and break
out before the ladies. There happened to be living here at that time a
stately English baronet and his wife, who had two milksop sons,
concerning whom they cherished the idea of accomplishing their education
into manhood coexistently with such perfect purity and innocence, that
they were hardly to know their own sex. Accordingly, they were sent to
no school or college, but had masters of all sorts at home, and thus
reached eighteen years or so, in what Falstaff calls a kind of male
green-sickness. At this crisis of their innocent existence, our ogre
friend encountered these lambs at dinner, with their father, at Cerjat's
house; and, as if possessed by a devil, launched out into such frightful
and appalling impropriety--ranging over every kind of forbidden topic
and every species of forbidden word and every sort of scandalous
anecdote--that years of education in Newgate would have been as nothing
compared with their experience of that one afternoon. After turning
paler and paler, and more and more stoney, the baronet, with a
half-suppressed cry, rose and fled. But the sons--intent on the
ogre--remained behind instead of following him; and are supposed to have
been ruined from that hour. Isn't that a good story? I can SEE our
friend and his pupils now. . . . Poor fellow! He seems to have a hard time
of it with his wife. She had no interest whatever in her children; and
was such a fury, that, being dressed to go out to dinner, she would
sometimes, on no other provocation than a pin out of its place or some
such thing, fall upon a little maid she had, beat her till she couldn't
stand, then tumble into hysterics, and be carried to bed