inst whatever
assumed to be high-principled and honorable. It could not be denied that
this man had been the world's choicest favorite. Upon _him_ had been
lavished all the honors and rewards usually reserved for the greatest
benefactors of their kind. The favors of the Crown, the friendship and
intimacy with the highest in station, immense influence with the members
of the Government, power and patronage to any extent, and, greater
than all these, because more wide-spread and far-reaching, a sort
of acceptance that all he said and did and planned and projected was
certain to be for the best, and that they who opposed his views or
disparaged his conceptions were sure to be mean-minded and envious
men, jealous of the noble ascendancy of his great nature. And all this
because he was rich and could enrich others! Had the insane estimate of
this man been formed by those fighting the hard battle of fortune, and
so crushed by poverty that even a glimpse of affluence was a gleam of
Paradise, it might have been more pardonable; but far from it. Davenport
Dunn's chief adherents and his primest flatterers were themselves great
in station and rolling in wealth; they were many of them the princes of
the land. The richest banker of all Europe--he whose influence has often
decided the fate of contending nations--was Dunn's tried and trusted
friend. The great Minister, whose opening speech of a session was the
_mot d'ordre_ for half the globe, had taken counsel with him, stooping
to ask his advice, and condescending to indorse his opinions. A proud
old noble, as haughty a member of his order as the peerage possessed,
did not disdain to accept him for a son-in-law; and now the great banker
was to find himself defrauded, the great minister disgraced, and
the noble Lord who had stooped to his alliance was to see his estate
dissipated and his fortune lost!

What a moral strain did not the great monitors of our age pour forth;
what noble words of reproof fell from Pulpit and Press upon the lust
of wealth, the base pursuit of gold; what touching contrasts were drawn
between the hard-won competence of the poor man and the ill-gotten
abundance of the gambler! How impressively was the lesson proclaimed,
that patient industry was a nobler characteristic of a people than
successful enterprise, and that it was not to lucky chances and
accidental success, but to the virtues of truthfulness, order, untiring
labor, and economy, that England owed the