He got as much out of the press as he could, and moved on in silence, heeding nothing of the cancan d'enfer and chaine du diable dancing round him. He was not a man who cared for noisy dissipations; they had no sort of attraction for him; indeed, dissipation at all had not much, unless it were associated with the intricacies of intrigue. He cared for nothing that was not ruse; his own life was emphatically so; he had begun it with serious disadvantages: first of birth, which, though gentle on one side, was not distinguished; of fortunes which were very impoverished; of a world in which he had no place, and which had no want of him; of a temperament that was intensely ambitious, intensely dissatisfied, and intensely speculative. Despite all these drawbacks, by dint of tact and finesse, he had now, when he was but thirty, moved for many years in some of the best society of Europe; he lived expensively, though he was very poor; and he was deferred to, though no one could have said why they gave him such a preference. He had the spirit of the gambler, with the talent of the statesman, and he found the world one great gaming-table. He could not be a statesman in his own country; England will not accept as statesmen what
