brains with a silver ladle. But the Leg so handled his utensil as to make a good meal with it, while the lord so managed his machine as to spill the soup and scald himself to boot.

This is a long passage rather, but it will be found pertinent to the sequel, should any body remember it a few chapters after sight. As sermons are said to reside in stones, I may be permitted to engraft a moral even on such material as my staple. The agency common to Oriental romance and our native fairy tale is no longer in fashion. So, as I wanted to be striking, and could not set before my reader a gentleman with Fortunatus's cap on his head, I presented him with one who worked as great marvels by means of a small duodecimo volume, which he carried in his pocket. At the period when I take him in hand, he is very rich-rich in land, rich in monies in the funds, and rich, or under the delusion that he is so, in fine gentlemen's securities, and promises to pay. I could have traced you, step by step (steps in "double quick") the rise and progress of Leatherlungs the Leg, to his position as leader of the ring. His lot was cast in times more favourable for the growth of rapid fortunes in his line of business than even the present. The ring is still a capital handicraft-by many degrees, indeed, one of the best going-but it's not what it was. Before its arcana became known out of the profession-when as yet shin-hammering, hocussing, and running horses of miscellaneous ages for great three-year-old stakes, was caviare to the million, a few seasons judiciously spent, did the thing. Our hero took to the ring when its mysteries were on their last legs. If rumour be true, he got safe over one Derby, on a four-year-old, which laid the nest-egg of his prosperity. This drew upon him the notice of the old hands. They, of course, knew all about the robbery which he had helped to put up, and watched its progress with much interest. It need hardly be said they took care to be on for a handsome stake, and without a shade of risk. Suspicion, however, attached to the transaction, and it was the cause of an appeal to a court of law, where, necessarily, the hard swearers had it. This glimpse of justice had its usual effect on the novice. It let him into the philosophy of roguery in general, which he forthwith applied to his own case in particular. As being "up" a second time for petty larceny qualifies the prig for "cracking" a warehouse, or even for burglary itself, so an insight into the practice of the Queen's Bench or Exchequer acts as a powerful stimulant upon the energy of the sharp-witted. He saw enough, in his first experience of the law, to satisfy him it was only the active agents that were placed in any jeopardy at all. The passive, who looked on and went with the stream, had carte blanche for impunity.

Thus did he read life with such consequence as attends those who are its self-taught pupils. These, for the most part, are prosperous, so long as they are content to gather their harvest from the surface of society; they have sown superficially; they incur no danger when they glean in like manner. They know mankind, in the aggregate, to be fools; while they allow the spice of their own follies to flavour their dealings, they are safe. Leatherlungs was born a latitudinarian rogue. He would have given his fingers letters of marque for picking and stealing, had he not been led to believe that the reputation for honesty was the best policy.

It is by no means certain any such reputation is necessary, or even useful in the ring; but while others adopted a dashing game, he played his cards cautiously and as honestly as he could. He wholly disapproved of the policy of one of his brotherhood, who took a trip to the continent, pendente lite, on a late remarkable occasion, and only returned when his presence was wanted at Tattersall's-to receive. This, he said, was too bad- -so it was for his practice-he got his bread without smothering the baker in one of his own sacks. Free from any direct confirmation of his having dug the hole into which so many of his customers were put," all the world was at liberty to know that he never made a bargain on which he was not tolerably sure of a thousand per

cent.

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And here, is it necessary I should pause to warn the reader that I am representing a class, although a single member sits as my model? Must I repeat that I am no portrait painter, but rather a moralist, fully assured that example is far beyond precept? Perhaps there may be an individual Leatherlungs-" in my mind's eye, Horatio," but the biography of an eccentric man, published during his life, to say nothing of its indifferent taste, runs the chance of being called by another name, according to the statute. When folks are dead, libels go for nothing, or thereabouts. 'It was Pulteney's business, we are to suppose," says a commentator on Akenside's celebrated Epistle to Curio,' "to abolish fairs and masquerades-to stint the young Duke of Marlborough to a bottle of brandy a day, and to prevail on Lady Vane to be content with three lovers at a time.' This is a style of writing not popular in relation to contemporaries. I sing the Leg, and his manner of carrying on the war-" Arma, virumque cano.' I show, as he is in the sample, so in the gross-a fellow of infinite wit. He is a sharp specimen of the natural man-uneducated, unmannerly, unseemly, unfriended, unknown, with as much skill in philosophy as in the Polka-as much familiarity with the belles lettres as with Abd-el-Kader; yet he bandies courtesy with the flower of our chivalry, and would be above-(let it be recorded to his manly credit)-supplicating a ticket for Almack's as a sturdy beggar craves an alms. With him, indeed, honour is a beau ideal; he knows not the meaning of either; but he pays his laundress every Saturday night, and his tailor can take an order from him without a twitch of the colic. When he plays at dice with the blood of all the Howards, he is 66 'the better man. ... If the Chancellor of the Exchequer were about to negotiate a loan with him, I would say, as Martha did of old Trapbois, "Have no money dealings with my father, or he will make an ass of you. ." Where, then, is his weak point? In aspiring to be that for which he was not intended by nature nor fitted by art. Take your Leg out of his element, and he is as helpless-as wholly beyond the exercise of his faculties-as a trout upon the marble slab at Groves's. Of this, our history is meant to be at once the moral and "the mathematical demonstration.”

PYRRHUS THE FIRST.

ENGRAVED BY E. HACKER, FROM A PAINTING BY J. F. HERRING, SEN.

"The highest possible gratification," as your after-dinner orator words it, or, in more common parlance, the finest thing in the world, is liable to a tolerable difference in interpretation, according to the different tastes, natural or acquired, of those declaiming on it. Being elected Lord Mayor, or invited to dine with him, might perhaps unravel the mystery with some of our friends; coquetting with a pretty girl, or marrying a rich one, might make it out with others; while, knowing your horse in a run, and knowing he's a good one, shall satisfy a third, as sucking iced sherry and sugar through a short straw answer for a fourth. To get, however, a little more definite, and quote "upon authority," we can't perhaps do better than begin with Lord Byron, who seems to have hesitated in his choice betwixt first love to the young heart and hock and soda water to the hot coppers. After his lordship we may give place to Beau Brummel, whose earthly happiness, we are told, was centred in clean linen and starched neckcloths: and so on, from the Oxonian who declared his content in a run-away hack, up to the Irish gentleman who wished for nothing better in this life than a cowld goose stuffed with potatoes for breakfast. We give these few just as a sample of what the world allows us to pick from, though at the same time we confess that to the late Lord Foley must we award the honour-in word, if not in deed-of signally surpassing them one and all: "I can imagine nothing finer," said that distinguished sportsman, "than the walk down Bond-street the day after you have won the Derby ;" and, by all that's blissful and self-evident, is there mortal man who opens on this essay that would attempt to dispute it! Only fancy the country cousin at your elbow, with the well-built, well-looking fellow on the other side of the street, and then the clincher you'll give to those extraordinary guesses at, and wonderful conceptions of, fine men he's so rapidly giving vent to. First of all it's Lord Alfred Paget; or, if it isn't him, it's Harrison, the singer; or, for a third try Mr. Mynn, the doubly-great cricketer; for one more still, his grace of Beaufort; and, as a give-itup to all he ever heard of as looking well and doing well, Mason, the steeple-chaser. "No, sir, no; all wrong; look at him again, for it's a chance not to be thrown away;" and then, with a distinct emphasis of expression, you proceed to inform him that the gentleman he is staring at is John Gully, Esq., the man who claimed the Derby the week before last, as the owner of Pyrrhus the (apropos) First; or, as the lads, according to their ideas of the more worthy, are wont to phrase it, "the man what belongs to Pyrrhus."

But the Gods forbid that this pin's-head worth of pardonable vanity should be all, or half, or a fourth, or fortieth of the joys a Derby winner is destined to feel or impart; only let us look up the county paper paragraphs of the bell-pulling, beer-drinking, beef-eating amusements