He employed foreign locutions at times, like Lord Hervey, a modish affectation of the time which distinguished the gentleman who had travelled from the country bumpkin. "I am going to speak to you of the past, Mr. Topsparkle. I am here to do you a friendly office, if I can." "Indeed, my lord, I have no consciousness of being at this present moment in need of friendly offices; nor do I think it is any man's business to concern himself about another man's history. The past belongs to him who made it." "Not always, Mr. Topsparkle. There are occasions when the history of the past concerns the law of the land--when undiscovered crimes have to be brought to light--and when wicked deeds, unrepented of and unatoned, have to be accounted for." "As in the case of Mr. Jonathan Wild and his young friend Jack Sheppard," said Topsparkle. "Your proposition is indisputable. But did your lordship outstay the company to tell me nothing newer in the way of argument or fact?" "No, sir; I am here to talk to you of your own crime, committed in this house, forty years ago; suspected at the time by a town which was not slow to give expression to its opinion; confessed only the other night by your tool and accomplice, Louis Fétis." "The hysterical ravings of a drunken valet are about as trustworthy as the libels of electioneering pamphleteers; and I am surprised that a man of the world like your lordship should concern himself with such folly," said Topsparkle. "The slander was as baseless as it was malicious." "Yet it drove you from England." "No, my lord; I left England because I was tired of a country in which the fine arts were still in their infancy. We have been improving since Handel and Bononcini came to London. In William's time there were not half a dozen good musicians in the kingdom. I wonder, Lord Lavendale, that you should take occasion to insult me upon the strength of a slander which I trampled out forty years ago, when my slanderers stood in the pillory." "Mr. Topsparkle, there are crimes which never can be brought home to the evil-doers; but there are other wrongs more easily proved even after a lapse of years. I cannot prove you a murderer, though I have the strongest moral evidence of your crime: first from the testimony of your victim's grandfather, Vincenti, and secondly from the confession of your accomplice and agent. But one act in your life I can prove to all the world, if it should be necessary to show the town what manner of man you are. I can at least demonstrate your hardness of heart as a father; how you, the sybarite and Croesus, were content to let your daughter expire in poverty." "I have never acknowledged a daughter." "But she was none the less your child--the child born in this house--the helpless babe whose unhappy mother you and Fétis poisoned." "'Tis false--a vile calumny--and you know it."