school of art.  The finest performances of our own age he snarled at cynically; and at length this querulous humor grew upon him so much, and he became so notorious as a laudator tentporis acti, that few people cared to seek his society.  This made him still more fierce and truculent.  He went about muttering and growling; wherever you met him he was soliloquizing and saying, “despicable pretender—­without grouping—­without two ideas upon handling—­without”—­and there you lost him.  At length existence seemed to be painful to him; he rarely spoke, he seemed conversing with phantoms in the air, his housekeeper informed us that his reading was nearly confined to God’s Revenge upon Murder, by Reynolds, and a more ancient book of the same title, noticed by Sir Walter Scott in his Fortunes of Nigel.  Sometimes, perhaps, he might read in the Newgate Calendar down to the year 1788, but he never looked into a book more recent.  In fact, he had a theory with regard to the French Revolution, as having been the great cause of degeneration in murder.  “Very soon, sir,” he used to say, “men will have lost the art of killing poultry:  the very rudiments of the art will have perished!” In the year 1811 he retired from general society.  Toad-in-the-hole was no more seen in any public resort.  We missed him from his wonted haunts—­nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he.  By the side of the main conduit his listless length at noontide he would stretch, and pore upon the filth that muddled by.  “Even dogs are not what they were, sir—­not what they should be.  I remember in my grandfather’s time that some dogs had an idea of murder.  I have known a mastiff lie in ambush for a rival, sir, and murder him with pleasing circumstances of good taste.  Yes, sir, I knew a tom-cat that was an assassin.  But now”—­and then, the subject growing too painful, he dashed his hand to his forehead, and went off abruptly in a homeward direction towards his favorite conduit, where he was seen by an amateur in such a state that he thought it dangerous to address him.  Soon after he shut himself entirely up; it was understood that he had resigned himself to melancholy; and at length the prevailing notion was, that Toad-in-the-hole had hanged himself.

The world was wrong there, as it has been on some other questions.  Toad-in-the-hole might be sleeping, but dead he was not; and of that we soon had ocular proof.  One morning in 1812, an amateur surprised us with the news that he had seen Toad-in-the-hole brushing with hasty steps the dews away to meet the postman by the conduit side.  Even that was something:  how much more, to hear that he had shaved his beard—­had laid aside his sad-colored clothes, and was adorned like a bridegroom of ancient days.  What could be the meaning of all this?  Was Toad-in-the-hole mad? or how?  Soon after the secret was explained—­in more than a figurative sense “the murder was out.”  For in came the London morning papers,