The Equinox (Volume I, Number VII)

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. 249