evil more than for good.  He is the victim, however, of more illusions with regard to himself than I ever knew a single brain to shelter.  At the age of twenty, poor, ignorant and remarkably handsome, he married a woman of immense wealth, many years his senior.  At the end of three years she very considerately took herself off and left him to the enjoyment of his freedom and riches.  If he had remained poor he might from time to time have rubbed at random against the truth, and would be able to recognize the touch of it.  But he wraps himself in his money as in a wadded dressing-gown, and goes trundling through life on his little gold wheels.  The greater part of his career, from the time of his marriage till about ten years ago, was spent in Europe, which, superficially, he knows very well.  He has lived in fifty places, known thousands of people, and spent a very large fortune.  At one time, I believe, he spent considerably too much, trembled for an instant on the verge of a pecuniary crash, but recovered himself, and found himself more frightened than hurt, yet audibly recommended to lower his pitch.  He passed five years in a species of penitent seclusion on the lake of—­I forget what (his genius seems to be partial to lakes), and laid the basis of his present magnificent taste for literature.  I can’t call him anything but magnificent in this respect, so long as he must have his punctuation done by a nature distinguee.  At the close of this period, by economy, he had made up his losses.  His turning the screw during those relatively impecunious years represents, I am pretty sure, the only act of resolution of his life.  It was rendered possible by his morbid, his actually pusillanimous dread of poverty; he doesn’t feel safe without half a million between him and starvation.  Meanwhile he had turned from a young man into an old man; his health was broken, his spirit was jaded, and I imagine, to do him justice, that he began to feel certain natural, filial longings for this dear American mother of us all.  They say the most hopeless truants and triflers have come to it.  He came to it, at all events; he packed up his books and pictures and gimcracks, and bade farewell to Europe.  This house which he now occupies belonged to his wife’s estate.  She had, for sentimental reasons of her own, commended it to his particular care.  On his return he came to see it, liked it, turned a parcel of carpenters and upholsterers into it, and by inhabiting it for nine years transformed it into the perfect dwelling which I find it.  Here he has spent all his time, with the exception of a usual winter’s visit to New York—­a practice recently discontinued, owing to the increase of his ailments and the projection of these famous memoirs.  His life has finally come to be passed in comparative solitude.  He tells of various distant relatives, as well as intimate friends of both sexes, who used formerly to be entertained at his cost; but with each of them, in the course