To do him justice, the man, so stony-hearted to others, loved and
cherished his own person with exquisite tenderness, lavished upon it
delicate attentions, and gave to it the very best he could afford. He
was no coarse debauchee, smelling of bad cigars and ardent spirits.
Cigars, indeed, were not among his vices (at worst the rare peccadillo of
a cigarette): spirit-drinking was; but the monster's digestion was still
so strong that he could have drunk out a gin-palace, and you would only
have sniffed the jasmine or heliotrope on the dainty cambric that wiped
the last drop from his lips. Had his soul been a tenth part as clean as
the form that belied it, Jasper Losely had been a saint! His apartments
secured, his appearance thus revised and embellished, Jasper's next care
was an equipage in keeping; he hired a smart cabriolet with a high-
stepping horse, and, to go behind it, a groom whose size had been stunted
in infancy by provident parents designing him to earn his bread in the
stables as a light-weight, and therefore mingling his mother's milk with
heavy liquors. In short, Jasper Losely set up to be a buck about town:
in that capacity Dolly Poole introduced him to several young gentlemen
who combined commercial vocations with sporting tastes; they could not
but participate in Poole's admiring and somewhat envious respect for
Jasper Losely. There was indeed about the vigorous miscreant a great
deal of false brilliancy. Deteriorated from earlier youth though the
beauty of his countenance might be, it was still undeniably handsome; and
as force of muscle is beauty in itself in the eyes of young sporting men,
so Jasper dazzled many a /gracilis puer/, who had the ambition to become
an athlete, with the rare personal strength which, as if in the
exuberance of animal spirits, he would sometimes condescend to display,
by feats that astonished the curious and frightened the timid,--such as
bending a poker or horseshoe between hands elegantly white, nor unadorned
with rings,--or lifting the weight of Samuel Dolly by the waistband, and
holding him at arm's length, with a playful bet of ten to one that he