en prompted by a desire to gain his
favour, ever seemed to him deserving of disapprobation. Talbot continued
to frequent the court, appeared daily with brazen front before the
princess whose ruin he had plotted, and was installed into the lucrative
post of chief pandar to her husband. In no long time Whitehall was
thrown into confusion by the news that Dick Talbot, as he was commonly
called, had laid a plan to murder the Duke of Ormond. The bravo was
sent to the Tower: but in a few days he was again swaggering about the
galleries, and carrying billets backward and forward between his patron
and the ugliest maids of honour. It was in vain that old and discreet
counsellors implored the royal brothers not to countenance this bad man,
who had nothing to recommend him except his fine person and his taste in
dress. Talbot was not only welcome at the palace when the bottle or
the dicebox was going round, but was heard with attention on matters of
business. He affected the character of an Irish patriot, and pleaded,
with great audacity, and sometimes with success, the cause of his
countrymen whose estates had been confiscated. He took care, however, to
be well paid for his services, and succeeded in acquiring, partly by
the sale of his influence, partly by gambling, and partly by pimping,
an estate of three thousand pounds a year. For under an outward show
of levity, profusion, improvidence, and eccentric impudence, he was in
truth one of the most mercenary and crafty of mankind. He was now no
longer young, and was expiating by severe sufferings the dissoluteness
of his youth: but age and disease had made no essential change in his
character and manners. He still, whenever he opened his mouth, ranted,
cursed and swore with such frantic violence that superficial observers
set him down for the wildest of libertines. The multitude was unable to
conceive that a man who, even when sober, was more furious and boastful
than others when they were drunk, and who seemed utterly incapable
of disguising any emotion or keeping any secret, could really be a
coldhearted, farsighted, scheming sycophant. Yet such a man was Talbot.
In truth his hypocrisy was of a far higher and rarer sort than the
hypocrisy which had flourished in Barebone's Parliament. For the
consummate hypocrite is not he who conceals vice behind the semblance
of virtue, but he who makes the vice which he has no objection to show a
stalking horse to cover darker and more profit