judgment of those averse to its enjoyment,--these never presented an
inducement to the stony temperament and dormant heart of Richard
Crauford.

He looked upon the essences of things internal as the common eye upon
outward nature, and loved the many shapes of evil as the latter does
the varieties of earth, not for their graces, but their utility. His
loves, coarse and low, fed their rank fires from an unmingled and
gross depravity. His devotion to wine was either solitary and unseen--
for he loved safety better than mirth--or in company with those whose
station flattered his vanity, not whose fellowship ripened his crude
and nipped affections. Even the recklessness of vice in him had the
character of prudence; and in the most rapid and turbulent stream of
his excesses, one might detect the rocky and unmoved heart of the
calculator at the bottom.

Cool, sagacious, profound in dissimulation, and not only observant of,
but deducing sage consequences from, those human inconsistencies and
frailties by which it was his aim to profit, he cloaked his deeper
vices with a masterly hypocrisy; and for those too dear to forego and
too difficult to conceal he obtained pardon by the intercession of
virtues it cost him nothing to assume. Regular in his attendance at
worship; professing rigidness of faith beyond the tenets of the
orthodox church; subscribing to the public charities, where the common
eye knoweth what the private hand giveth; methodically constant to the
forms of business; primitively scrupulous in the proprieties of
speech; hospitable, at least to his superiors, and, being naturally
smooth, both of temper and address, popular with his inferiors,--it
was no marvel that one part of the world forgave to a man rich and
young the irregularities of dissipation, that another forgot real