180 Lights and Shadows of London Life. 



minutest segment of that which is called the circle of pleasure," 

 and his narrative shall be another illustration of his axiom who de- 

 clared that " truth is strange." Let him take at random from street 

 or square any mansion, and however brief its tenancy, its history 

 shall be a moral decameron ! 



The outline of his early career, whose fortunes form the action of 

 this sketch, in no way differs from that of the thousands who every 

 season fret and strut their hour in the harlequinade of London life, 

 and then are seen no more. Domiciled in the most fashionable cara- 

 vansera of the West, his cards bore an unexceptionable "impri- 

 matur." All his appointments were faultless, his person prepossessing, 

 his manners refined, his mind cultivated; he was, in its essential 

 meaning, a gentleman. Those with whom he lived on terms of 

 intimacy knew nothing of his history beyond the fact of his unques- 

 tionable claim to respectability on the grounds of having no ostensible 

 means of obtaining his livelihood. Some of his associates had been 

 with him at Eton, and knew him " at Mother Angelo's," where he 

 bought the roarer of Jack Peer and stuck him into Mat Milton, 

 warranting his pipes as clear as Highgate Archway! To others he 

 had been known during his matriculation at Oriel ; by the greater pro- 

 portion, however, of his associates, the history of his birth and gene- 

 ration was as little understood or cared about as that of the Wander- 

 ing Jew. Such was the position of Chalcroft, whose career, brief as 

 meteoric, was but a counterpart of full many " a lost Pleiad" of the 

 London season. The story of his early life had but little to distin- 

 guish it, perchance, from " many another one," yet some sketch of it 

 is essential to preface a tale, whose interest, should it possess any, is 

 interwoven with its earliest associations, and whose moral is based 

 upon their influences. 



Of that portion of his existence which preceded the dawn of reason 

 and observation, Chalcroft was ever in ignorance ; when first per- 

 ception entered upon its office, he was fighting against the formidable 

 odds of a public school, when scarce five summers had furnished their 

 stamina for the struggle. Christmas and Midsummer brought a 

 precise old man, who took away " Master William" in a yellow 

 chariot, and at the end of a few hours he was closely scrutinized by 

 a gentleman whom he called " Papa," and kissed by a lady who 

 called him "her darling Willy." In a few years he had formed a 

 better acquaintance with home and its inmates. His father, a man 

 of elegant appearance and great acquirements, used to examine him 

 upon the day of his arrival probably, but beyond that his notice very 

 rarely extended. His mother, a Frenchwoman, whose father had 

 been one of the Protestant refugees, was in character the antipodes 

 of his other parent. In person she was commanding, and what is 

 conventionally understood as distingue ; her hair, which was profuse, 

 was dark and shining as the raven's wing, her coal-black eye bespoke 

 the spirit of which it was the index, while her face, deeply marked 

 by the small-pox, was physically deprived of any assistance from 

 expression to soften a fierte by which her natural bearing and de- 

 meanour were distinguished. From her he met either the most 

 lavish caresses or violent reproaches ; her temper seemed the very 



