AN OBITUARY
meanness and cruelty of a eunuch he combined the calculating
avarice of a Scotch Jew, without the whisky of the one or the
sympathetic imagination of the other.
Perfidious and hypo—
critical as the Jesuit of Protestant fable, he was unctuous as
Uriah Heep, and for the rest possessed the vices of Joseph
Surface and Tartufe;
yet, being without the human
weak—
nesses which makes them possible, he was a more virtuous,
and therefore a more odious, villain.
In feature resembling a shaven ape, in figure a dislocated
Dachshund, his personal appearance was at the first glance
unattractive.
But the clothes made by a City tailor lent such
general harmony to the whole as to reconcile the observer to
the phenomenon observed.
Of unrivalled cunning, his address was plausible
; he con-
cealed his genius under a mask of matchless mediocrity, and
his intellectual force under the cloak of piety.
In religion he
was an Evangelical, that type of Nonconformist who remains
in the Church in the hope of capturing its organization and
its revenues.
An associate of such creatures of an inscrutable Providence
as Coote and Torrey, he surpassed the one in sanctimonious-
ness, the other in bigotry, though he always thought blackmail
too risky, and slander a tactical error.
Without heart or conscience, either in his family relations
or his public functions, he goes to a grave covered by the
flowers of those who think it politic to pretend to honour him;
and it is his tragedy that of all the obituaries penned by servile
or venal dupes or accomplices of his misdeeds, none will survive
the century. This article remains his sole enduring monument.
A. QUILLER, JR.
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