ngy mansion, with its verandahs of dusky green, and its blinds
perpetually drawn, there attached an interest, a consideration, and
a mystery. Thither, at the dusk of night, were the hired carriages
of intrigue wont to repair, and dames to alight, careful seemingly of
concealment, yet wanting, perhaps, even a reputation to conceal. Few, at
the early hours of morn, passed that street on their way home from
some glittering revel without noticing some three or four chariots
in waiting;--or without hearing from within the walls the sounds of
protracted festivity. That house was the residence of a man who had
never done anything in public, and yet was the most noted personage in
Society in early life, the all-accomplished Lovelace! in later years
mingling the graces with the decayed heart and the want of principle of
a Grammont. Feared, contemned, loved, hated, ridiculed, honoured, the
very genius, the very personification, of a civilized and profligate
life seemed embodied in Augustus Saville. Hitherto we have spoken of,
let us now describe him.

Born to the poor fortunes and equivocal station of cadet in a noble but
impoverished house, he had passed his existence in a round of lavish,
but never inelegant, dissipation. Unlike other men, whom youth, and
money, and the flush of health, and aristocratic indulgence, allure
to follies, which shock the taste as well as the morality of the wise,
Augustus Saville had never committed an error which was not varnished
by grace, and limited by a profound and worldly discretion. A systematic
votary of pleasure--no woman had ever through him lost her reputation
or her sphere; whether it was that he corrupted into fortunate
dissimulation the minds that he betrayed into guilt, or whether he chose
his victims with so just a knowledge of their characters, and of the
circumstances round them, that he might be sure the secrecy maintained
by himself would scarcely be divulged elsewhere. All the world
attributed to Augustus Saville the most various and consummate success
in that quarter in which success is most envied by the lighter part
of the world: yet no one could say exactly who, amongst the many he
addressed, had been the object of his triumph. The same quiet, and yet
victorious discretion waited upon all he did. Never had he stooped to
win celebrity from horses or from carriages; nothing in his equipages
showed the ambition to be distinguished from another; least of all did
he affect that