h his conversation--as pithy as it was apt
to be impure--his wit, his taste, his information, his judgment;
sensible, too, of the excellence of his wines, and luxuriance of
his table, around which military officer and civil servant, merchant
and judge, were accustomed to assemble, rank and office were
forgotten, etiquette laid aside, and abandon ruled the hour.
Votaries of Venus and of Bacchus were all of them, however disguised;
and, secure in that close conclave, where no pure female presence
was found to check the bacchanalian song, or forbid the ribald
jest, all sat to listen to and applaud their host's inimitable
stories, his grotesque descriptions, his wayward thoughts and
fantastic images; to hearken to his close analysis, his robust
reasoning, his wondrous pathos, his sublime exaggeration; and, as
the wine circulated, to observe yet more his chameleon aspect and
Protean character unfold itself; now grovelling like the Paradisal
toad, wherein, at the ear of Eve, was hidden the form of Lucifer;
now, touched by the Ithuriel spear of some keen conception, suddenly
soaring, like to the bright expanded shape of the surprised and
fallen Archangel, till the guests themselves, like the startled
Ithuriel recoiling from the instant apparition of the fiend, drew
back in amazement, or, as if at the jests of another Yorick, raised
over the table a long, eruptive roar. Nor was that all. For a moment
he would assume the moralist, the theologian, or,--leaving both
revelation and the pandects,--become the philosopher, pacing the
universe for occult truth; or the metaphysician, tracking the region
of the supersensuous; and, over every theme, flying on mocking
mental pinions, seeming an intellectual satan, passing through the
region of vain questionings and doubtful disquisition, dim out to
the abyss. And thus he lived, using, and abusing, his rare gifts;
no virtuous and accomplished wife presiding at these feasts, ever
degenerating into orgies, or giving sanctity to these walls; within
which were gathered the brightest, gayest, noblest, most powerful
--often most dissolute--of the land. But now the guests were thinned
in numbers by death, by marriage, by worn out passions; and many
a fierce spirit had been tamed by adversity, till the mirth had
grown to be half moody, and the saturnalia gross rather in intention
than in fact.

[Illustration: "As if at the jests of another Yorick, raised over
the table a long, eruptive roar."]