there, is a good man in his way—­oh, no thanks Jones; it is not a compliment!—­and I’d like to see the man who dared say that I’m not speaking the truth, for I used to put my hands up like a good one when we were boys at the old ’varsity, sir.  Jones, this gentleman would like something; and I don’t mind taking a double dose of Glenlivat with a brother-scholar and a gentleman like myself.”  So the mawkish creature maunders on until one’s gorge rises; but the stolid carters, the idle labourers, the shoemaker from the shop round the corner, admire his eloquence, and enjoy the luxury of pitying a parson and an aristocrat.  How very numerous are the representatives of this type, and how unspeakably odious they are!  This foul weed in dirty clothing assumes the pose of a bishop; he swears at the landlord, he patronizes the shoemaker—­who is his superior in all ways—­he airs the feeble remnants of his Latin grammar and his stock quotations.  He will curse you if you refuse him drink, and he will describe you as an impostor or a cad; while, if you are weak enough to gratify his taste for spirits, he will glower at you over his glass, and sicken you with fulsome flattery or clumsy attempts at festive wit.  Enough of this ugly creature, whose baseness insults the light of God’s day!  We know how he will end; we know how he has been a fraud throughout his evil life, and we can hardly spare even pity for him.  It is well if the fellow has no lady-wife in some remote quarter—­wife whom he can rob or beg from, or even thrash, when he searches her out after one of his rambles from casual ward to casual ward.

In the wastes of the great cities the army of the degraded swarm.  Here is the loose-lipped rakish wit, who tells stories in the common lodging-house kitchen.  He has a certain brilliancy about him which lasts until the glassy gleam comes over his eyes, and then he becomes merely blasphemous and offensive.  He might be an influential writer or politician, but he never gets beyond spouting in a pot-house debating club, and even that chance of distinction does not come unless he has written an unusually successful begging-letter.  Here too is the broken professional man.  His horrid face is pustuled, his hands are like unclean dough, he is like a creature falling to pieces; yet he can show you pretty specimens of handwriting, and, if you will steady him by giving him a drink of ale, he will write your name on the edge of a newspaper in copper-plate characters or perform some analogous feat.  All the degraded like to show off the remains of their accomplishments, and you may hear some odious being warbling. “Ah, che la morte!” with quite the air of a leading tenor.  In the dreadful purlieus lurk the poor submissive ne’er-do-well, the clerk who has been imprisoned for embezzlement, the City merchant’s son who is reduced to being the tout of a low bookmaker, the preacher who began as a youthful phenomenon and ended by embezzling the Christmas dinner fund, the