A Book of Scoundrels by Charles Whibley
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page 9 of 176 (05%)
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every point; and the art was so little understood, that it merely added
a leaf to his crown of glory. Now, though Walpole was far too well-bred to oppose the demand of an armed stranger, Maclaine, in defiance of his craft, discharged his pistol at an innocent head. True, he wrote a letter of apology, and insisted that, had the one pistol-shot proved fatal, he had another in reserve for himself. But not even Walpole would have believed him, had not an amiable faith given him an opportunity for the answering quip: 'Can I do less than say I will be hanged if he is?' As Maclaine was a coward and no thief, so also he was a snob and no gentleman. His boasted elegance was not more respectable than his art. Fine clothes are the embellishment of a true adventurer; they hang ill on the sloping shoulders of a poltroon. And Maclaine, with all the ostensible weaknesses of his kind, would claim regard for the strength that he knew not. He occupied a costly apartment in St. James's Street; his morning dress was a crimson damask banjam, a silk shag waistcoat, trimmed with lace, black velvet breeches, white silk stockings, and yellow morocco slippers; but since his magnificence added no jot to his courage, it was rather mean than admirable. Indeed, his whole career was marred by the provincialism of his native manse. And he was the adored of an intelligent age; he basked a few brief weeks in the noonday sun of fashion. If distinction was not the heritage of the Eighteenth Century, its glory is that now and again a giant raised his head above the stature of a prevailing rectitude. The art of verse was lost in rhetoric; the noble prose, invented by the Elizabethans, and refined under the Stuarts, was |
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