A Wan of Great and Acknowledged Ability,

Otago Witness, Issue 1915, 3 August 1888, Page 31

A Wan of Great and Acknowledged Ability,

popularity, and acquaintance with the world could desire. There was scarcely a house in England where he would not have been-re-ceived as an honoured guests and with open arms. No elevation, . no advancement was impossible to the keen wit, the brilliant faculty, the large acquaintance with the world, which he brought into a delighted society always pleased with the original and the entertaining; and he was not a man of whom it could be doubted that he had an ever-lively and responsive enjoyment in the excitements of social life.

All at once this brilliant, much-courted, and ever-welcome personage disappeared from the place where he had seemed to be so completely on the top of the wave of good fortune and ambition. The acute and daring assault upon the fashionable world, quite uncompromising in its identification of social vices, to which he gave the name of " Piccadilly " came upon the world with a shock. The fun that mingled with its sarcasm, the laugh in it that rang as true as if it had no bitter meaning, the perception finer than all sarcasm of goodness and truth which no social vice ever overcomes wholly, gave extraordinary force to this attack. And there was something underneath which gave a tantalising interest, a sensation of the mysterious and incomprehensible. The wild, witty, halfmad hero of Mr Oliphant's romance had met in the 'course of his adventures with a prophet whose revelations had changed to him the character of all things. What he said of this stranger without a name stimulated the interest, the excitement of the reader ; but explanation or description fihe gave none. And then, while " Piccadilly " was still talked about,