The next day his first care was to distribute fifty pounds among his friends the cadgers, at a house of call in Westminster, and formally to dissolve his connection with them; those present undertaking for the “fraternity,” that for the future he should never be noticed by them in public or private.
I cannot follow his career much further. Adversity had taught him nothing. He was soon again surrounded by the well-bred vampires who had forgotten him when penniless; but they amused him, and that was enough. The ten thousand pounds were rapidly melting when he invited me to a grand dinner at Richmond, which included a dozen of the most agreeable, good-looking, well-dressed dandies of London, interspersed with a display of pretty butterfly bonnets. We dined deliciously, and drank as men do of iced wines in the dog-days—looking down from Richmond Hill.
One of the pink bonnets crowned Fitz-Roy with a wreath of flowers; he looked—less the intellect—as handsome as Alcibiades. Intensely excited and flushed, he rose with a champagne glass in his hand to propose my health.
The oratorical powers of his father had not descended on him. Jerking out sentences by spasms, at length he said, “I was a beggar—I am a gentleman—thanks to this——”
Here he leaned on my shoulder heavily a moment, and then fell back. We raised him, loosened his neckcloth—
“Fainted!” said the ladies—
“Drunk!” said the gentlemen—
IV.
“Evil is Wrought by Want of Thought.”
“IT must come some day; and come when it will, it will be hard to do, so we had best go at once, Sally. I shall have more trouble with Miss Isabel than you will with Miss Laura; for I am twice the favorite you are.”