e, he contracted engagements which followed him for at
least ten years after his entrance into life, and then only quitted him
to leave him bound to others far more tremendous and inextricable. His
most frequent visitors, his most constant friends, his most familiar
acquaintance, were money-lenders. He had borrowed money upon all
possible and unimaginable securities, from the life of his grandmother
down to that last resource of the needy gentleman, the family repeater,
chain, and appendages. His lordship, desperate as his position was, was
a man of breeding, a nobleman in thought and feeling. But the more
incapable of doing wrong, so much the more liable to deceit and fraud.
He had been passed, so to speak, from hand to hand by all the
representatives of the various money-lending classes that thrive in
London on the folly and necessity of the reckless and the needy. All had
now given him up. His name had an odour in the market, where his paper
was a drug. His bills of a hundred found few purchasers at a paltry five
pounds, and were positively rejected by all but wine-merchant-sheriff's
officers, who took them at nothing, and contrived to make a handsome
profit out of them into the bargain. Few had so little reason to be
proud as the man whose name had become a by-word and a joke amongst the
most detestable and degraded of their race; and yet, strange as it may
seem, few had a keener sense of their position, or could be so readily
stung by insult, let it but proceed from a quarter towards which
punishment might be directed with credit or honour. A hundred times Lord
Downy had cursed his fate, which had not made him an able-bodied porter,
or an independent labourer in the fields, rather than that saddest of
all sad contradictions, a nobleman without the means of sustaining
nobility--a man of rank with no dignity--a superior without the shadow
of pre-eminence; but for all the wealth of the kingdom, he would not
have sullied the order to which he belonged, by what he conceived to be
one act of meanness or sordid selfishness; as if there could be any
thing foul or base in any act that seeks, by honourable industry, to
repair the errors of a wayward fortune.

Upon the day of which we speak, there sat with Lord Downy a rude,
ill-favoured man, brought into juxtaposition with the peer by the
unfortunate relation that connected the latter with so many men of
similar stamp and station. He seemed more at home in the apartment than