In his earlier years, however, he was too bitter, and his stories contain far too many scoundrels. “I don’t know where I get all these rascals for my books,” he said apologetically: “I have certainly never lived with such people.” “The Yellowplush Correspondence” does not contain a single man or woman we should like to meet. Yellowplush is a scamp; Dawkins is silly and snobbish; Blewitt, the cardsharper, is a bully and a fool; Lady Griffin is not pleasant, and though she is badly treated, her revenge is too cruel; the Earl of Crabs--the creation of a master hand--is a terrible man, whose sense of humour only makes him more dangerous; and Deuceace himself, cardsharper, swindler, fortune-hunter ... yet with such a father what was he to become? The foolish Mathilda demands some pity; for at least she is loyal to the man who married her only because he thought she had money: “My Lord, my place is with him.” Who will record the unwritten chapters of the life of the Honourable Algernon Percy Deuceace? There is plenty of material, if not for authentic history, at least for legitimate speculation. It [Illustration: MR. MICHAEL ANGELO TITMARSH as he appeared at Willis’s Rooms in his celebrated character of Mr. Thackeray _From a sketch by John Leech_] is known that at Lord Bagwig’s the Honourable Algie won from young Tom Rook the sum of thirty pounds; that with his friend Mr. Ringwood (who, with the invaluable assistance of his hostess, trapped the commercial traveller, Pogson, into the signing of bills for huge amounts at the house of Madame la Baronne de Florval-Delval, _née_ de Melval-Norval) he won heavily at the card-table from Mr. Vanjohn; and that with Blundell-Blundell (who was up at Oxford with Arthur Pendennis) he contrived to swindle Colonel Altamont. Then there is the paragraph in “_Galignani’s Messenger_,” quoted in the last chapter of “A Shabby Genteel Story”: “Married at the British Embassy, by Bishop Luxcombe, Andrew Fitch, Esq., to Marianne Caroline Matilda, widow of the late Antony Carrickfergus, of Lombard Street, and Gloucester Place, Esquire.... Miss Runt officiated as bridesmaid; and we remarked among the company Earl and Countess Crabs, General Sir Rice Curry, K.C.B., Colonel Wapshot, Sir Charles Swang, the Hon. Algernon Percy Deuceace and his lady, Count Punter, and others of the _élite_ of the fashionables now in Paris. The bridegroom was attended by his friend Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Esq., and the lady was given away by the Right Hon. the Earl of Crabs....” Had the Hon. Mrs. Deuceace forgiven her husband the blow in the _Bois_, with the account of which the adventure of Mr. Deuceace at Paris concluded? Was the younger couple reconciled to the elder? and if so, by what means? As the author does not solve the problem, each reader must do so for himself.