encumbering himself of the superfluity of worldly dross which had
fallen to his share. A little _cogging, sleeving, and palming_; nay, a
mere spindle judiciously planted, or a few long ones introduced on the
weaving system, could have effected in one evening what fifty milling
matches, considering the 'glorious uncertainty' attaching to pugilistic
as well as legal contests, might fail to accomplish. By this method,
too, the person in whom they kindly took so strong an interest would,
even when he had lost every thing, have escaped the imputation of having
dissipated his property. It would have been comfortably distributed
in respectable dividends among a few gentlemen of acknowledged talent,
instead of floating in air like the leaves of the

~201~~Sibyl, and alighting in various parts of the inner and outer
ring; now depositing a few cool hundreds in the pockets of a sporting
Priestley bookseller, or the brother of a Westminster Abbott; now
contributing a small modicum to brighten the humbler speculations of the
Dean-street casemen, or the Battersea gardener.

"But to this conclusion Horatio would not come. He was good for backing
and betting on pugilists, but on the turf he would do little, and at the
tables nothing. His zealous friends had therefore no chance in the way
they would have liked best; but being men of the world, and knowing,
like Gay's bear, that

'There might be picking
Ev'n in the carving of a chicken,'

they did not disdain to make the most in their power by watching the
motions of his hobby, and if this was not a sufficient prize to furnish
much cause for exultation, it was at least one that it would have been
unwise to reject.

"A contemporary writer has exerted to the utmost the very little talent
he possesses to represent the peagreen's uniform resistance to all the
temptations of cards and dice, as a proof of his possessing a strength
of mind and decision of character rarely found in young men of his
fortune and time of life. In the elegant language of this apologist, the
count, by this prudent abstinence, 'has shown himself not half so green
as some supposed, and the sharps, and those who have tried on the
grand mace with him, have discovered that he was no flat.' How far this
negative eulogium may be gratifying to the feelings of the individual
on whom it is bestowed, I will not say; in my character of English Spy
I have been under the necessity of carefully observing th