he met Prebendary Maxwell, the wild parson who wrote
_Captain Blake_: so that here and now it is natural to find him leaping
turf-carts and running away from his creditors. At Brussels, where he
physicked the British Embassy and the British tourist, he knew all sorts
of people--among them Commissioner Meade, the original of Major Monsoon,
and Cardinal Pecci, the original of Leo XIII.--and saw all sorts of life,
and ran into all sorts of extravagance: until of a sudden, he is back
again in the capital, editing the _Dublin University Magazine_. Of
course he was the maddest editor ever seen. For him cards, horses, and
high living were not luxuries but necessaries of life; yet all the while
he believed devoutly in medicine, and with his family indulged with
freedom in the use of calomel and such agents. Presently he abandoned
Ireland for the Continent. He took his horses with him, and astonished
Europe with a four-in-hand of his own. Carlsruhe knew him well, as
Belgium and the Rhine had known him. He only left the Reider Schloss at
Bregenz to conquer Italy; and at Florence, Spezzia, and finally Trieste,
he shone like himself.

What He Was.

He was a born _poseur_. His vanity made him one of the worst--the most
excessive--of talkers; go where he would and do what he might, he was
unhappy if the first place were another's. In all he did he was greedy
to excel, and to excel incontestably. Like his own Bagenal Daly he would
have taken the big jump with the reins in his mouth and his hands tied,
'just to show the English Lord-Lieutenant how an Irish gentleman rides.'
He was all his life long confounding an English Lord-Lieutenant of some
sort; for without display he would have pined away and died. At
Templeogue he lived at the rate of 3,000 pounds a year on an income of
1,200 pounds; at Brussels he kept open house on little or nothing for all
the wandering grandees of Europe; at Florence they used to liken the
cavalcade from his house to a procession from Franconi's; he found living
in a castle and spending 10 pounds a day on his horses the finest fun in
the world. He existed but to bewilder and dazzle, and had he not been a
brilliant and distinguished novelist he would have been a brilliant and
distinguished something else. As he kept open house everywhere, as he
was fond of every sort of luxury, as he loved not less to lend money to
his intimates than to lose it to them at cards, and as he got but poor
pri