1785, and was now, therefore, about seventy years old. He had started
in life poor, with no family distinction, but with some more or less
useful connections either on the father's or the mother's side. He had
somehow got an English education, and he had pursued his career on the
basis of his native wits, his indomitable effrontery and persistence,
his faculty of familiarity, his indifference to rebuffs, his lack of
shame, conscience, and morality. How he found the means to live nobody
could tell, but he uniformly lived well and had enjoyed the good
things of the world. After maintaining his ground during the first
twenty or thirty years, it had probably been easier for him to forge
along afterwards, for he could impose upon the new generation with his
stories of success in the former one. Uncouth and ugly though he was
by nature, the external polish and trick of good form which he had
acquired, and, no doubt, some inner force of social genius in him, had
influenced men to tolerate and often to like him, and had given him
extraordinary good-fortune with women. He had not only been twice
married, and had many children born in wedlock, but his intrigues and
liaisons had been innumerable, and they had by no means been confined
to the lower ranks of society. That he was a practised liar there can
be no doubt, but he had the long memory which the proverb recommends
to liars, and he was so circumspect that few of his claims and
pretensions lacked solid basis enough to make them pass current in a
hurrying and heedless world. Now, however, in his age, he was wellnigh
at the end of his tether; what we should call his "pull" was losing
its efficiency; he was lapsing to the condition where he would offer
to introduce a man to the Prince of Wales or to Baron Rothschild, and
then ask him for the loan of five pounds--or half a crown, as the case
might be. He was a character for Thackeray. He haunted my father for a
year or two more, and then vanished I know not where.