"It is strange," he continued, "that he never spoke about his younger days. Lord Chudleigh attracted to himself, between the age of five-and-twenty and thirty, the friendship and respect of many men, like myself, of scholarship and taste, without fortune. He with his friends was going to supply that defect, a promise which circumstances prevented him from fulfilling. The earthen vessel swims merrily, in smooth water, beside the vessel of brass; when a storm rises it breaks to atoms. We were the earthen vessels, he the brazen; we are all broken to atoms and ground beneath the heel. I, who almost alone survive, though sunk as low as any, am yet not the least miserable, and can yet enjoy the three great blessings of humanity in this age--I mean tobacco, punch, and the Protestant religion. Yet one or two of the earthenware pots survive: Judge Tester, for instance, a fellow whose impudence has carried him upwards. He began by being a clown born and bred. First he was sent to the Inns of Court, where he fell into a red waistcoat and velvet breeches, and so into vanity. Impudence, I take it, is the daughter of vanity. As for the rest, a few found their way to this classic region, on which Queen Elizabeth from the Gate of Lud looks down with royal benignity; but these are gone and dead. One, I know, took to the road, and is now engaged in healthful work upon a Plantation of Maryland; two were said to have joined the Waltham Blacks, and lived like Robin Hood, on venison shot in the forest, and other luxuries demanded of wayfarers pistol in hand; one I saw not long ago equipped as a smallcoal man in blue surplice, his shoulder laden with his wooden tinder, and his measure twisted into the mouth of his sack; another, a light-weight and a younger son, became a jockey, and wore the leathern cap, the cut bob, the buff breeches, and the fustian frock, till he was thrown and broke his neck. I laugh when I think of what an end hath come to all the greatness of those days. To be sure, my lord paid for all and promised future favours; but we were fine gentlemen on nothing, connoisseurs with never a guinea, dilettanti who could not pay for the very eye-glasses we carried. In the province of love and gallantry every man, beggar as he was, thought himself a perfect Oroondates. We sang with taste; we were charming men, nonpareils. We had the tastes of men of fortune; we talked as if the things we loved were within our reach; we dreamed of pictures, bronzes, busts, intaglios, old china, or Etruscan pateræ. And we had the vices of the great as well as their tastes. Like them we drank; like them we diced; like them we played all night at brag, all-fours, teetotum, hussle-cup, chuck-farthing, hazard, lansquenet. So we lived, and so we presently found the fate of earthen vessels. Heaven hath been kinder to some of us than we deserve. Wherefore, gentlemen, drink about." Here the Doctor looked round him. "Gentlemen, I perceive that