the owner remains impassive, and as soon as settling-day is over, he endeavours to forget the matter.  I have seen an old man watching a race on which he had planned to win sixty thousand pounds; his horse was beaten in the last two strides, and the old gentleman never so much as stirred or spoke.  No doubt he was really transported out of himself; but nothing in the world seemed capable of altering the composure of his wizened features.  On the other hand, there is one man who is known to possess some four millions in cash, besides an immense property; this man never bets more than two pounds at a time, yet from his wild fits of excitement it might be supposed that his colossal wealth was at stake.

So the whole army of the gamblers pass in their mad whirlwind march toward the region of night; they are delirious, they are creatures of contradictions—­they are fiercely greedy, lavishly generous, wary in many things, reckless of life, ready to take any advantage, yet possessed by a diseased sense of honour.  Some of them think that a man is better and happier when he feels all his faculties working rather than when he goes off into blind transports of excitement or fear or doubt.  I think that the man who is conscious to his very finger-tips is better than the wild creature whose senses are all blurred.  I hold that the student or thinker who faces life with a calm and calculated desire for true knowledge is better off than the insensate being whose hours are passed in a sordid nightmare.  But I see little chance of ever making men care little for the gambler’s pleasure, and I humbly own to the existence of an ugly mystery which only adds yet another to the number of dark puzzles whereby we are surrounded.  I observe that desperate efforts are made to put down gambling by law rather than by culture, religion, true and gentle morality.  As well try to put down the passions of love and fear—­as well try to interdict the beat of the pulses!  We may deplore the gambler’s existence as much as we like; but it is a fact, and we must accept it.

XX.

SCOUNDRELS.

Byron very often flung out profound truths in his easy, careless way, but the theatrical vein in his composition sometimes prompted him to say dashing things, not because he regarded them as true, but because he wanted to make people stare.  Speaking of one interesting and homicidal gentleman, the poet observes—­

  “He knew himself a villain, and he deemed
  The rest no better than the thing he seemed.”

Now I take leave to say that the rawest of fifth-form lads never uttered a more school-boyish sentiment than that; and I wonder how a man of the world came to make such a blunder.  Byron had lived in the degraded London of the Regency, when Europe’s rascality flocked towards St. James’s as belated birds flock towards a light; and he should have known some villains if any one did.  Ephraim Bond, the