forth false pretences.  I have had much fun out of these “tipsters,” for they are deliciously impudent blackguards.  A fellow will send you the names of six horses—­all losers; in two days he will advertise—­“I beg to congratulate all my patrons.  This week I was in great form on the whole, and on Thursday I sent all six winners.  A thousand pounds will be paid to any one who can disprove this statement.”  Considering that the sage sent you six losers on the Thursday, you naturally feel a little surprised at his tempestuously confident challenge.  All the seers are alike; they pick names at haphazard from the columns of the newspapers, and then they pretend to be in possession of the darkest stable secrets.  If they are wrong, and they usually are, they advertise their own infallibility all the more brazenly.  I do not exactly know what getting money under false pretences may be if the proceedings which I have described do not come under that heading, and I wonder what the police think of the business.  They very soon catch a poor Rommany wench who tells fortunes, and she goes to gaol for three months.  But I suppose that the Rommany rawnee does not contribute to the support of influential newspapers.  A sharp detective ought to secure clear cases against at least a dozen of these parasites in a single fortnight, for they are really stupid in essentials.  One of the brotherhood always sets forth his infallible prophecies from a dark little public-house bar near Fountain Court.  I have seen him, when I came off a journey, trying to steady his hand at seven in the morning; his twisted, tortured fingers could hardly hold the pencil, and he was fit for nothing but to sit in the stinking dusk and soak whisky; but no doubt many of his dupes imagined that he sat in a palatial office and received myriads of messages from his ubiquitous corps of spies.  He was a poor, diseased, cunning rogue; I found him amusing, but I do not think that his patrons always saw the fun of him.

And last there comes the broad outer circle, whereof the thought makes me sad.  On that circle are scattered the men who should be England’s backbone, but they are all suffering by reason of the evil germs wafted from the centre of contagion.  Mr. Matthew Arnold often gave me a good deal of advice; I wish I could sometimes have given him a little.  I should have told him that all his dainty jeers about middle-class denseness were beside the mark; all the complacent mockery concerning the deceased wife’s sister and the rest, was of no use.  If you see a man walking right into a deadly quicksand, you do not content yourself with informing him that a bit of fluff has stuck to his coat.  Mr. Arnold should have gone among the lower middle-class a trifle more instead of trusting to his superfine imagination, and then he might have got to know whither our poor, stupid folks are tending.  I have just ended an unpleasantly long spell which I passed among various centres where middle-class leisure is spent, and I