_A Matter of Untold History--The Terrible Machinery of the Law as a Means of Persecution--Edwin James's Rascality_. Our practice has furnished many illustrations of Thackeray's shrewd remark, that "Most men have sailed near the dangerous isles of the Sirens at some time of their lives, and some have come away thence wanting a strait-waistcoat." The following is a case in point, which occurred in the time of the Tweed _régime_. The position, wealth and influence of the somewhat mature Lothario, backed by the more or less corrupt judiciary of those days, prevented the ventilation of this most remarkable and sensational scandal of our times in the newspapers. Begun as a piquant flirtation, the intimacy, so far as the principal actor was concerned, traversed all the stages between bliss and rapture on the one side, and fear and remorse on the other--between garlands of roses and the iron link, forging a clanking manacle of the past. A man of singularly graceful presence and attractive mien; a leading member of the bar, whose Corinthian taste and princely hospitality nominated him as a fitting host of the Queen of England's eldest son, when he visited this city; a prominent figure in the returning board that conferred the Presidency on Hayes; and finally his country's representative at a leading European court; he now sleeps the sleep which sooner or later comes to all--to victim as well as to victimizer. It was about sundown of a beautiful evening in the early autumn of 1865, that the aristocratic lawyer first beheld the lady with whom he was to become so insanely infatuated. But slightly advanced in the thirties, the widow of a leading officer of the Confederate Army Medical Staff, and formerly a leading Baltimore belle, she was a fascinating and beautiful woman, when meeting the lawyer that evening on Fifth avenue, near Delmonico's old place, she met Fate. It seems to have been a mutual infatuation--a case of love at first sight, and in a moment of delirium, under an impulse which was perhaps uncontrollable, she sacrificed her virtue and her self-respect. The story of her infatuation reads like the distempered dream of an opium-eater. It was a case of fervent love on both sides. They met on the avenue, looked, spoke and, without more ado, proceeded to Delmonico's to sup. The amour thus begun soon assumed a romantic intensity. When she left the city, he dispatched ridiculously "spoony" telegrams to her in Baltimore, and in his daily letters indulged in a maudlin sentimentality that might have inspired the envy of a sighing Strephon in his teens.