urning, at night, to my own home, from my long and solitary walks,
I often passed the house in which Clarke lodged; and sometimes I met him
reeling by the door, insulting all who passed; and yet their resentment
was absorbed in their disgust. 'And this loathsome, and grovelling
thing,' said I, inly, 'squanders on low excesses, wastes upon outrages
to society, that with which I could make my soul as a burning lamp, that
should shed a light over the world!"

"There was that in this man's vices which revolted me far more than
the villainy of Houseman. The latter had possessed no advantages of
education; he descended to no minutiae of sin, he was a plain, blunt,
coarse wretch, and his sense threw something respectable around his
vices. But in Clarke you saw the traces of happier opportunities of
better education; it was in him not the coarseness of manner so much as
the sickening, universal canker of vulgarity of mind. Had Houseman money
in his purse, he would have paid a debt and relieved a friend from mere
indifference; not so the other. Had he been overflowing with wealth,
he would have slipped from a creditor, and duped a friend; there was a
pitiful and debasing weakness in his nature, which made him regard the
lowest meanness as the subtlest wit. His mind too was not only degraded,
but broken by his habits of life; a strange, idiotic folly, that made
him love laughing at his own littleness, ran through his character.
Houseman was young; he might amend; but Clarke had grey hairs and dim
eyes; was old in constitution, if not years; and every thing in him was
hopeless and confirmed; the leprosy was in the system. Time, in this,
has made Houseman what Clarke was then.

"One day, in passing through the street, though it was broad noon, I
encountered Clarke in a state of intoxication, and talking to a crowd he
had collected around him. I sought to pass in an opposite direction; he
would not suffer me; he, whom I sickened to touch, to see, threw himself
in my way, and affected gibe and insult, nay even threat. But when he
came near, he shrank before the mere glance of my eye, and I passed on
unheeding him. The insult galled me; he had taunted my poverty, poverty
was a favourite jest with him; it galled me; anger, revenge, no! those
passions I had never felt for any man. I could not rouse them for the
first time for such a cause; yet I was lowered in my own eyes, I was
stung. Poverty! he taunt me! He dream himself, on account