little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and
Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once
begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many
a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought
little of at the time. _Principiis obsta_--that's my rule." Such was my
speech, and I have always acted up to it; so if that is not being virtuous,
I should be glad to know what is. But now about the dinner and the club.
The club was not particularly of my creation; it arose pretty much as other
similar associations, for the propagation of truth and the communication of
new ideas, rather from the necessities of things than upon any one man's
suggestion. As to the dinner, if any man more than another could be held
responsible for that, it was a member known amongst us by the name of
_Toad-in-the-hole_. He was so called from his gloomy misanthropical
disposition, which led him into constant disparagements of all modern
murders as vicious abortions, belonging to no authentic school of art. The
finest performances of our own age he snarled at cynically; and at length
this querulous humor grew upon him so much, and he became so notorious as a
_laudator tentporis acti_, that few people cared to seek his society. This
made him still more fierce and truculent. He went about muttering and
growling; wherever you met him he was soliloquizing and saying, "despicable
pretender--without grouping--without two ideas upon handling--without"--and
there you lost him. At length existence seemed to be painful to him;
he rarely spoke, he seemed conversing with phantoms in the air, his
housekeeper informed us that his reading was nearly confined to _God's
Revenge upon Murder_, by Reynolds, and a more ancient book of the same
title, noticed by Sir Walter Scott in his _Fortunes of Nigel_. Sometimes,
perhaps, he might read in the Newgate Calendar down to the year 1788, but
he never looked into a book more recent. In fact, he had a theory with
regard to the French Revolution, as having been the great cause of
degeneration in murder. "Very soon, sir," he used to say, "men will have