Not often have the betting ring and the tipsters and “the boys” generally come across so soft a thing as they found in Ernest Benzon, whose meteoric course lasted just two years. It must be confessed that this extraordinary young man contrived to fill the public eye during that period to the exclusion of more useful subjects, and it cost him just a quarter of a million of money to achieve that splendid notoriety. The fortune to which Benzon—known during his brief career on the turf as “the Jubilee Juggins”—succeeded was made by his father, a Birmingham man. The trade by which it was accumulated was that of constructing umbrella-frames. That a fortune thus made should have been inherited by one who was utterly oblivious to the necessity of laying by something for a rainy day strikes a reflective person as being at once strange and sad. Benzon did not acquire the sobriquet “Juggins” for nothing. He was the last man in the world to whom the control of a fortune should have been committed. Benzon was absolutely vain, frivolous, and assertive. He fancied himself no end at things for which he had no very great aptitude. As an instance of this, I remember quite well how he challenged John Roberts at pyramids for a sovereign a ball. Of course, Roberts “took him on,” with what result can be imagined. He had that sort of sickly sentimentality which may be encountered in the sixpenny gallery of the homes of melodrama—a sentimentality which can exist in natures incapable of any quite genuine emotion. Benzon squandered money, and doubtless was robbed of money; but I have never heard a case in which he spent money on a generous impulse or with the intention of doing an act of solid benefit to an individual or to the human race. Yet I accompanied him on one occasion to the Adelphi Theatre. A melodrama of the ordinary Adelphi sort was being played, and Benzon became so extremely touched by the sufferings of the heroine that he began blubbering like a child. Nor can it be said that the exhibition was explicable on the ground that the “Juggins” was “crying drunk.”