As, however, he was upon extremely good terms with a lady who is one of the pleasantest companions that we can have in life, and whose name is Dame Fortune, those instances in which the chances were equally balanced generally turned out as he could have wished, and he both served his friend and regained his money, with the proper addition of interest, both in bank-notes and friendship. He never met with but one great misfortune in his life up to the time of our commencing his history; but that misfortune drove him from the county town, and caused him to settle underneath the old castle by the seaside. He lost neither his wife nor his daughter, his health, his spirits, nor his fortune. No! it was an addition, not a loss, that cut him to the heart. One of the members of the common council, it seems, had a brother who was a silversmith in London, and who, having made a comfortable competence, wisely retired from trade, came down to the town of which he was a native and a freeman, and was soon admitted into the municipal body. Now, whether he had frequented a debating society or the reporters' gallery of St. Stephen's, whether he had studied under Cobbett or Hunt, Burdett or Hume, or any of those gentlemen--we do not mean either to be personal or political--any of those gentlemen, we say, famed for opposition, it would seem as if, from the moment he came down, he had determined to overthrow the supremacy of our worthy friend, and to worry him as though he had been a bishop, a baited bull, or a prime-minister. Moreover, he was oratorical; he would speak you a speech by the hour, in which he would confound all that the straightforward good sense of our friend had made clear; he would pour upon the simplest point a torrent of fine words, not always pronounced with the utmost purity; he would render the most pellucid position opaque by the turbid stream of eloquence, and would add a few words of Latin, with very little reverence for the terminations of the nouns or the tenses of the verbs, but still with sufficient volubility to astound and overawe the ignorant ears around him. Our friend was resolved not to die without a struggle; and, at the close of any of these triumphant orations, he would rise, feeling morally convinced--seeing, knowing, believing--that all his adversary said was idle, absurd, and stupid, but yet labouring under a consciousness of his own incapability to disentangle the subject which had been twisted up into a Gordian knot, or even to find out the thin, feeble, and insignificant thread of his foe's argumentation amid the crystals of sugar candy with which his eloquence had invested it. He would rise, as we have said, and gasp, and struggle, and sit down again, impotent of reply.