y; and at length
this querulous humor grew upon him so much, and he became so notorious as a
_laudator tentporis acti_, that few people cared to seek his society. This
made him still more fierce and truculent. He went about muttering and
growling; wherever you met him he was soliloquizing and saying, "despicable
pretender--without grouping--without two ideas upon handling--without"--and
there you lost him. At length existence seemed to be painful to him;
he rarely spoke, he seemed conversing with phantoms in the air, his
housekeeper informed us that his reading was nearly confined to _God's
Revenge upon Murder_, by Reynolds, and a more ancient book of the same
title, noticed by Sir Walter Scott in his _Fortunes of Nigel_. Sometimes,
perhaps, he might read in the Newgate Calendar down to the year 1788, but
he never looked into a book more recent. In fact, he had a theory with
regard to the French Revolution, as having been the great cause of
degeneration in murder. "Very soon, sir," he used to say, "men will have
lost the art of killing poultry: the very rudiments of the art will
have perished!" In the year 1811 he retired from general society.
Toad-in-the-hole was no more seen in any public resort. We missed him from
his wonted haunts--nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he. By the side of
the main conduit his listless length at noontide he would stretch, and pore
upon the filth that muddled by. "Even dogs are not what they were, sir--not
what they should be. I remember in my grandfather's time that some dogs had
an idea of murder. I have known a mastiff lie in ambush for a rival, sir,
and murder him with pleasing circumstances of good taste. Yes, sir, I knew
a tom-cat that was an assassin. But now"--and then, the subject growing too
painful, he dashed his hand to his forehead, and went off abruptly in a
homeward direction towards his favorite conduit, where he was seen by an
amateur in such a state that he thought it dangerous to address him. Soon
after he shut himself entirely up; it was understood that he had resigned
himself to melancholy; and at length the prevailing notion was, that
Toad-in-the-hole had hanged himself.

The world was wrong _there_, as it has been on some other questions.
Toad-in-the-hole might be sleeping, but dead he was not; and of that we
soon had ocular proof. One morning in 1812, an amateur surprised us with
the news that he had seen Toad-in-the-hole brushing with hasty steps the
dews away to