hose bad people worse.
Many fierce words and bad passions, many falsehoods and knaveries on
Tom's part, much bitterness, scorn, and jealousy on the part of Hayes
and Catherine, might be attributed to this hoary old tempter, whose
joy and occupation it was to raise and direct the domestic storms and
whirlwinds of the family of which he was a member. And do not let us be
accused of an undue propensity to use sounding words, because we compare
three scoundrels in the Tyburn Road to so many armies, and Mr. Wood to
a mighty field-marshal. My dear sir, when you have well studied the
world--how supremely great the meanest thing in this world is, and how
infinitely mean the greatest--I am mistaken if you do not make a strange
and proper jumble of the sublime and the ridiculous, the lofty and the
low. I have looked at the world, for my part, and come to the conclusion
that I know not which is which.

Well, then, on the night when Mrs Hayes, as recorded by us, had been to
the Marylebone Gardens, Mr. Wood had found the sincerest enjoyment in
plying her husband with drink; so that, when Catherine arrived at home,
Mr. Hayes came forward to meet her in a manner which showed he was not
only surly, but drunk. Tom stepped out of the coach first; and Hayes
asked him, with an oath, where he had been? The oath Mr. Billings
sternly flung back again (with another in its company), and at the same
time refused to give his stepfather any sort of answer to his query.

"The old man is drunk, mother," said he to Mrs. Hayes, as he handed that
lady out of the coach (before leaving which she had to withdraw her hand
rather violently from the grasp of the Count, who was inside). Hayes
instantly showed the correctness of his surmise by slamming the door
courageously in Tom's face, when he attempted to enter the house with
his mother. And when Mrs. Catherine remonstrated, according to her wont,
in a very angry and supercilious tone, Mr. Hayes replied with equal
haughtiness, and a regular quarrel ensued.

People were accustomed in those days to use much more simple and
expressive terms of language than are now thought polite; and it would
be dangerous to give, in this present year 1840, the exact words of
reproach which passed between Hayes and his wife in 1726. Mr. Wood sat
near, laughing his sides out. Mr. Hayes swore that his wife should not
go abroad to tea-gardens in search of vile Popish noblemen; to which
Mrs. Hayes replied, that Mr. Hayes was a