I had the good fortune to partake of some admirable dinners in Tyburnia—­magnificent dinners indeed; but rendered doubly interesting from the fact that the house was that occupied by the late Mr. Sadleir.  One night the late Mr. Sadleir took tea in that dining-room, and, to the surprise of his butler, went out, having put into his pocket his own cream-jug.  The next morning, you know, he was found dead on Hampstead Heath, with the cream-jug lying by him, into which he had poured the poison by which he died.  The idea of the ghost of the late gentleman flitting about the room gave a strange interest to the banquet.  Can you fancy him taking his tea alone in the dining-room?  He empties that cream-jug and puts it in his pocket; and then he opens yonder door, through which he is never to pass again.  Now he crosses the hall:  and hark! the hall-door shuts upon him, and his steps die away.  They are gone into the night.  They traverse the sleeping city.  They lead him into the fields, where the gray morning is beginning to glimmer.  He pours something from a bottle into a little silver jug.  It touches his lips, the lying lips.  Do they quiver a prayer ere that awful draught is swallowed?  When the sun rises they are dumb.

I neither knew this unhappy man, nor his countryman—­Laertes let us call him—­who is at present in exile, having been compelled to fly from remorseless creditors.  Laertes fled to America, where he earned his bread by his pen.  I own to having a kindly feeling towards this scapegrace, because, though an exile, he did not abuse the country whence he fled.  I have heard that he went away taking no spoil with him, penniless almost; and on his voyage he made acquaintance with a certain Jew; and when he fell sick, at New York, this Jew befriended him, and gave him help and money out of his own store, which was but small.  Now, after they had been awhile in the strange city, it happened that the poor Jew spent all his little money, and he too fell ill, and was in great penury.  And now it was Laertes who befriended that Ebrew Jew.  He fee’d doctors; he fed and tended the sick and hungry.  Go to, Laertes!  I know thee not.  It may be thou art justly exul patriae.  But the Jew shall intercede for thee, thou not, let us trust, hopeless Christian sinner.

Another exile to the same shore I knew:  who did not?  Julius Caesar hardly owed more money than Cucedicus:  and, gracious powers!  Cucedicus, how did you manage to spend and owe so much?  All day he was at work for his clients; at night he was occupied in the Public Council.  He neither had wife nor children.  The rewards which he received for his orations were enough to maintain twenty rhetoricians.  Night after night I have seen him eating his frugal meal, consisting but of a fish, a small portion of mutton, and a small measure of Iberian or Trinacrian wine, largely diluted with the sparkling waters of Rhenish Gaul.  And this was all he had; and this man earned and paid away talents upon talents; and