formed out of ruder and tougher materials—to be converted, welded, and tempered into pliancy. The _manners_ of the great British family have decidedly improved under culture—“_emollit mores_:” may the sturdy self-respect of the race never be impaired! TWO CHAPTERS ON BANK NOTE FORGERIES. CHAPTER I. Viotti’s division of violin-playing into two great classes—good playing and bad playing—is applicable to Bank note making. The processes employed in manufacturing good Bank notes we have already described: we shall now cover a few pages with a faint outline of the various arts, stratagems, and contrivances employed in concocting bad Bank notes. The picture cannot be drawn with very distinct or strong markings. The tableaux from which it is copied are so intertwisted and complicated with clever, slippery, ingenious scoundrelism, that a finished chart of it would be worse than morally displeasing:—it would be tedious. All arts require time and experience for their development. When anything great is to be done, first attempts are nearly always failures. The first Bank note forgery was no exception to this rule, and its story has a spice of romance in it. The affair has never been circumstantially told; but some research enables us to detail it:— In the month of August, 1757, a gentleman living in the neighbourhood of Lincoln’s Inn Fields named Bliss, advertised for a clerk. There were, as was usual even at that time, many applicants; but the successful one was a young man of twenty-six, named Richard William Vaughan. His manners were so winning and his demeanour so much that of a gentleman (he belonged indeed to a good county family in Staffordshire, and had been a student at Pembroke Hall, Oxford), that Mr. Bliss at once engaged him. Nor had he occasion, during the time the new clerk served him, to repent the step. Vaughan was so diligent, intelligent, and steady, that not even when it transpired that he was, commercially speaking, “under a cloud,” did his master lessen confidence in him. Some enquiry into his antecedents showed that he had, while at College, been extravagant; that his friends had removed him thence; set him up in Stafford as a wholesale linen draper, with a branch establishment in Aldersgate Street, London; that he had failed, and that there was some difficulty about his certificate. But so well did he excuse his early failings and account for his misfortunes, that his employer did not check the regard he felt growing towards him. Their intercourse was not merely that of master and servant. Vaughan was a frequent guest at Bliss’s table; by-and-by a daily visitor to his wife, and—to his ward.