Mr. Theodore Shelf was a _gourmand_ of the first water. He preached most violently against all people who drank to excess, and seemed scarcely to discriminate between these and other people who were decorously moderate. He included them all in one sweeping anathema, and rammed home his charges with countless texts always once a Sunday, and usually on several weekdays as well. He was a powerful exhorter in his own particular narrow groove, was Mr. Theodore Shelf, and a vast number of people believed in him, and put out their savings to usury under his directions. But he was, as I say, a _gourmand_ of note. He paid his _chef_ £300 a year, and would have thought himself permanently injured in constitution if his truffles by accident happened to be English, and not from Perigord Forest. He over-ate himself habitually, and made no particular disguise about it. There is no influential society to make a national sin of bestial over-feeding, or otherwise Mr. Theodore Shelf would doubtless have posed as an ascetic in public, and—kept biscuits and a jar of _foie gras_ beside the brandy-bottle in the safe. There wasn’t a man in England who knew better how to get the votes of his clique, and their influence, and the handling of their money. There was not a man in Europe less inclined to mortify the flesh or undergo exertion without adequate return. He was not a vastly clever man, if one came to add him up. He had climbed from a humble clerkship to a very giddy eminence by the nice exercise of three strong faculties. He had great discrimination, he was a quick thinker, and he was brilliantly unscrupulous. When he saw a move that would eventually pay him, he had the wit to single it out in an instant from a thousand others, and decide on the road which led to his own personal profit. Then he disregarded the sneers of the well-dressed crowd—rather courted them, in fact, when they enabled him to pose as a martyr—and went in for the project heart, tongue, and soul. He could put such beautiful unction into the performance that even the most bigoted of the enemy never thought of questioning his own personal sanctity; and meanwhile the great earnest mob of his followers were chorusing the man’s praises with fervor and fanatical zeal.