er, and resumed the talk
which our entrance had interrupted. It was chiefly about people of whom
we youngsters knew nothing--though our ignorance only argued ourselves
unknown, for he named persons all famous in their day. He had seen
George IV., Napoleon, Talleyrand, Wellington; he had been intimate with
Coleridge, De Quincey, Wordsworth, Lamb, Monk Lewis; he was a sort of
elder brother or deputy uncle to Tennyson, Browning, Dickens; he
had quaffed mountain-dew with Walter Scott and had tramped the moors
shoulder to shoulder with Kit North; the courts of Europe were his
familiar stamping-grounds; he had the nobility and gentry at his
finger-ends; he was privileged, petted, and sought after everywhere; if
there were any august door we wished to enter, any high-placed personage
we desired to approach, any difficult service we wanted rendered, he was
the man to help us to our object. Who, then, was he? He has long been
utterly forgotten; but he was well known, or notorious, during the first
half of the last century; he was such a character as could flourish only
in England. His name was William Jerdan; he was born in 1785, and was
now, therefore, about seventy years old. He had started in life
poor, with no family distinction, but with some more or less useful
connections either on the father's or the mother's side. He had somehow
got an English education, and he had pursued his career on the basis of
his native wits, his indomitable effrontery and persistence, his
faculty of familiarity, his indifference to rebuffs, his lack of shame,
conscience, and morality. How he found the means to live nobody could
tell, but he uniformly lived well and had enjoyed the good things of the
world. After maintaining his ground during the first twenty or thirty
years, it had probably been easier for him to forge along afterwards,
for he could impose upon the new generation with his stories of success
in the former one. Uncouth and ugly though he was by nature, the
external polish and trick of good form which he had acquired, and, no
doubt, some inner force of social genius in him, had influenced men
to tolerate and often to like him, and had given him extraordinary
good-fortune with women. He had not only been twice married, and had
many children born in wedlock, but his intrigues and liaisons had been
innumerable, and they had by no means been confined to the lower ranks
of society. That he was a practised liar there can be no doubt, but h