Mr. Wilkins took his ease and his pleasure yet more and more every year of his life; nor did the quality of his ease and his pleasure improve; it seldom does with self-indulgent people.  He cared less for any books that strained his faculties a little—­less for engravings and sculptures—­perhaps more for pictures.  He spent extravagantly on his horses; “thought of eating and drinking.”  There was no open vice in all this, so that any awful temptation to crime should come down upon him, and startle him out of his mode of thinking and living; half the people about him did much the same, as far as their lives were patent to his unreflecting observation.  But most of his associates had their duties to do, and did them with a heart and a will, in the hours when he was not in their company.  Yes!  I call them duties, though some of them might be self-imposed and purely social; they were engagements they had entered into, either tacitly or with words, and that they fulfilled.  From Mr. Hetherington, the Master of the Hounds, who was up at—­no one knows what hour, to go down to the kennel and see that the men did their work well and thoroughly, to stern old Sir Lionel Playfair, the upright magistrate, the thoughtful, conscientious landlord—­they did their work according to their lights; there were few laggards among those with whom Mr. Wilkins associated in the field or at the dinner-table.  Mr. Ness—­though as a clergyman he was not so active as he might have been—­yet even Mr. Ness fagged away with his pupils and his new edition of one of the classics.  Only Mr. Wilkins, dissatisfied with his position, neglected to fulfil the duties thereof.  He imitated the pleasures, and longed for the fancied leisure of those about him; leisure that he imagined would be so much more valuable in the hands of a man like himself, full of intellectual tastes and accomplishments, than frittered away by dull boors of untravelled, uncultivated squires—­whose company, however, be it said by the way, he never refused.

And yet daily Mr. Wilkins was sinking from the intellectually to the sensually self-indulgent man.  He lay late in bed, and hated Mr. Dunster for his significant glance at the office-clock when he announced to his master that such and such a client had been waiting more than an hour to keep an appointment.  “Why didn’t you see him yourself, Dunster?  I’m sure you would have done quite as well as me,” Mr. Wilkins sometimes replied, partly with a view of saying something pleasant to the man whom he disliked and feared.  Mr. Dunster always replied, in a meek matter-of-fact tone, “Oh, sir, they wouldn’t like to talk over their affairs with a subordinate.”