in his composition sometimes prompted him to
say dashing things, not because he regarded them as true, but because
he wanted to make people stare. Speaking of one interesting and
homicidal gentleman, the poet observes--

"He knew himself a villain, and he deemed
The rest no better than the thing he seemed."

Now I take leave to say that the rawest of fifth-form lads never
uttered a more school-boyish sentiment than that; and I wonder how a
man of the world came to make such a blunder. Byron had lived in the
degraded London of the Regency, when Europe's rascality flocked
towards St. James's as belated birds flock towards a light; and he
should have known some villains if any one did. Ephraim Bond, the
abominable moneylender and sportsman, was swaggering round town in
Byron's later days; Crockford, that incarnate fiend, had his nets
open; and ruined men--men ruined body and soul--left the gambling
palace where the satanic spider sat spinning his webs. Byron must have
known Crockford, and he had there a chance of studying a being who was
indeed a villain, but who fancied himself to be a highly respectable
person. From the time when "Crocky" started money-lending in the back
parlour of his little fish-shop up to his last ghastly appearance on
earth, he was a cheat and a consummate rascal; and even after death
his hideous corpse was made to serve a deception. He was engaged in a
Turf swindle, and it was necessary that he should be regarded as alive
on the evening of the Derby day; but he died in the morning, and, to
deceive the betting-men, the lifeless carcass of the old robber was
put upright in a club window, and a daring sharper caused the dead
hand to wave as if in greeting to the shouting crowd--a fit end to a
bad life. Crockford's delusion was that his character was marked by
honesty and general benevolence; and those who wished to please him
pretended to accept his own comfortable theory. He regarded himself as
a really good fellow, and in his own person he was a living
confutation of Byron's dashing paradox. Then there was Renton
Nicholson, a specimen of social vermin if ever there was one. This
fellow earned a sordid livelihood by presiding over a club where men
met nightly in orgies that stagger the power of belief. His huge
figure and his raffish face were seen wherever rogues most did
congregate; he showed young men "life"--and sometimes his work as
cicerone led them to death; his style of conversation wou