c 
 
 si- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS, 
 
 A NOVEL. 
 
 BY 
 
 MRS A GORE, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS," "STORY 
 Otf A] HtVtfAt ">FAVOUpI7E^ ETC. 
 
 ' Ce gros Suisse ayant apporte dans sa cabane un panier rempli de grenouillcs, 
 dont il comptait me regaler, mes valets de bouche lui montrerent qu'il s'y 
 trouvait meles des crapauds." 
 " ' Ma foi,' repondit-U, ' tant pis pour eux.' " 
 
 MEMOIRES DE MONTLDC. 
 
 IN THREE VOLUMES. 
 
 VOL. I. 
 
 LONDON: 
 HENRY COLBURN, PUBLISHER, 
 
 GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 
 
 1846. 
 
RFY&ELt >NIV WFfGHT, 
 ,HTTLE PULTENET STREET. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Welcome, Immortal ! welcome to thy grave. BUTLER. 
 
 AN unusual degree of stir and bustle was 
 perceptible one Midsummer day in the house- 
 hold at Hillingdon Hall, a fine old seat 
 in Lancashire, belonging to a fine young 
 lord, who derived both his title and income 
 from the property. Housemaids and lady's- 
 maids were seen scudding, with an air of 
 importance, along the corridors ; and a chaise, 
 with jaded and smoking post-horses, was 
 drawn up near the offices. Some event of 
 considerable importance was evidently in, 
 
 progress. 
 
 VOL. i. x R 
 
 M86349 
 
 361 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 The butler stood on the steps of the 
 : portico: overlooking the park, exhibiting 
 /, Ms; tyoacl red ; face ,and broad white waistcoat ; 
 ' while,' with' an' ' outspread hand overshading 
 his eyes, he peered out upon the distant 
 domain, in hopes of obtaining a glimpse of 
 my lord, who had sauntered out after luncheon 
 with his dogs. But no Lord Hillingdon was 
 to be seen ! Divers menials of the house, 
 from the standard footman in his plush and 
 tags to the stable-helper in his fustian suit, 
 were vainly despatched in search of him ; and 
 it was not till his return two hours after- 
 wards, at the summons of the dinner-gong, 
 that his lordship was apprized by a portly 
 dame, arrayed in dimity and Valenciennes, 
 that he was father of a son and heir, and 
 that my lady was "as well as could be 
 expected." 
 
 " My lord " expected, apparently, that she 
 should be as well as usual ; for instantly 
 rushing to her apartment, without regard to 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 3 
 
 the admonitions of the nurse or the warning 
 of closed window-shutters and muffled doors, 
 he signified in his usual robust and sports- 
 manlike tones to the invalid his joy that 
 all was over, and his gratitude at being 
 blest with a boy. 
 
 Lady Hillingdon was too languid either 
 to remonstrate \or reply ; but the stately 
 dame in dimity hastened to conduct him 
 into the adjoining chamber ; where, attended 
 by half-a-dozen smiling, chattering ladies of 
 the bedchamber, the new-born ba'be, half 
 smothered in lace and cambric, lay nestling 
 in a costly^ crib, as fine as silk, gilding, and 
 rosewood could render the first receptacle 
 of a creature of clay, newly struggled into 
 a world of care and tribulation. 
 
 All made way for the happy father ; who 
 was requested to admire his own dimple 
 on the chin of his little son, and my lady's 
 sweet smile upon lips which were just then 
 
 distorted by a recent dose of physic into an 
 
 B 2 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 expression of considerable distaste for the 
 ways of this world. But Lord Hillingdon, 
 if less enthusiastic than the nurses, was too 
 much gratified by the birth of an heir to 
 his estate to care about its claims to the 
 personal beauty of either parent. The 
 village bells were about to be rung and 
 bonfires to blaze in the park, though the 
 dimple in the chin might be apocryphal, 
 and Lady Hillingdon's sweet smile decidedly 
 supposititious. 
 
 The value of this acquisition to the family 
 was, in fact, exceedingly enhanced by having 
 been four yearswaited for. Lord Hillingdon, 
 after succeeding to the family title and 
 estates in early boyhood, and going through 
 the usual aristocratic routine of Eton and 
 Oxford, had fallen desperately in love at 
 the first ball of his first season in town, with 
 the sweet face of a certain Emma Corbet, 
 displayed there for the express purpose of 
 being fallen in love with ; the daughter of 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 5 
 
 parents of moderate fortune, ambitious of 
 forming good matches for their children. 
 They had made a dash beyond their means, 
 in order to introduce the lovely Emma into 
 society ; and thought themselves sufficiently 
 rewarded for their risk when, within a week 
 of his first introduction, young Hillingdon 
 made proposals in form; and, within six, 
 was honoured with their daughter's hand 
 at the altar. 
 
 So fashionable a wedding naturally called 
 forth the comments of the newspapers and 
 the envy of many of their readers. Mr and 
 Mrs Corbet, though they could give no 
 fortune to the bride, chose to dazzle the 
 eyes of the world by a splendid trousseau ; 
 and Emma, the appliances and means of 
 whose vanity had hitherto been limited, was 
 justified in the inference that the grand 
 object of matrimony is to exchange tiffany 
 for velvet, and jacconot for brocade. During 
 the month that preceded her nuptials, she 
 
6 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 was continually summoned from the side of 
 her adoring Hillingdon, to try on dresses or 
 decide upon the comparative shades of a satin. 
 She heard of nothing but finery! and the 
 point lace of her wedding-gown was far more 
 voluminously discussed in her hearing than 
 the duties of the holy estate into which she 
 was about to enter. 
 
 Her mother exulted loudly, indeed, in the 
 excellence of the match, while her father pro- 
 tested that Emma was a devilish lucky girl ; 
 but as no mention of Lord Hillingdon's per- 
 sonal qualities entered into their enumeration 
 of the advantages of the connexion, the bride 
 was left to conclude that the chief part of her 
 good fortune consisted in the coronet embroi- 
 dered on her cambric handkerchiefs and pin- 
 cushion covers, and the case of family jewels 
 reported to be resetting for her use. 
 
 Emma Corbet was not yet eighteen; and 
 her first season in town, which was to be her 
 last, had not destroyed the simplicity of mind 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 7 
 
 arising from the previous seventeen passed 
 almost exclusively in the dull school-room of 
 her father's obscure residence at Hindon 
 Manor. Drilled into a prodigious waste of 
 useless knowledge and a thousand trivial pur- 
 suits, by a governess selected by Mrs Corbet 
 on account of the slightness of her salary, the 
 young girl welcomed her introduction into 
 society as the means of escape from Miss 
 Rickets; and even rejoiced in the prospect of 
 her aristocratic alliance, chiefly as relieving 
 her from all chance of a return to Hindon, 
 where three younger sisters were being perse- 
 cuted according to the utmost rigour of the 
 law of governesses. 
 
 The Corbets were people who did nothing 
 to conciliate the confidence of tlieir children. 
 Their main object in life was to appropriate a 
 small income to the best advantage; and ena- 
 ble their offspring to push their own way in 
 the world, and take as early a flight as possi- 
 ble from the parent nest. They were pleased 
 
8 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 to find their children, like their partridges, 
 strong on the wing. 
 
 But although it is the custom to portray 
 all persons whose affections are neglected in 
 early life, as having a prodigious fund of un- 
 broached sensibility ready to lavish on the 
 first person ambitious of their love, there 
 cannot be a greater mistake. The heart 
 requires almost as much education as the 
 mind. People accustomed to see no import- 
 ance ascribed to the exercise of the affections, 
 become gradually inaccessible to their influ- 
 ence ; and Emma Corbet knew nothing of the 
 happiness derivable from the gentler sympa- 
 thies of human nature. The only misery she 
 had ever heard bewailed, was poverty; the 
 only possessions she had ever heard coveted, 
 were equipages, jewels, a good house in town, 
 and a fine seat in the country. It was but 
 natural, therefore, that she should behold in 
 Lord Hillingdon, the "fortunate accident" 
 that was to confer these blessings on herself; 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 rather than a frank, reckless, warm-hearted, 
 good-humoured young man, who, overlooking 
 her want of fortune and connexion, and wor- 
 shipping her beauty, was eager to place in her 
 keeping the honours of his future life. 
 
 Mr Corbet complained grievously of the 
 indifference evinced by Lord Hillingdon to- 
 wards the progress of his new carriages, and 
 the terms of his new settlements ; and Mrs 
 Corbet was often indignant at his exac- 
 tions upon Emma's time and attention, to 
 the detriment of the rival claims of milliners 
 and mantua-makers. But Emma was too 
 accustomed to find her girlish errors mag- 
 nified into crimes by her parents, to feel 
 alarmed by their accusations against the vol- 
 atility of her future lord; and accompanied 
 him eventually to St George's Church, satisfied 
 that it would be no very difficult matter to be 
 happy as the wife of a peer of the realm, with 
 twenty thousand a year, such a profusion of 
 fine jewels, and so hearty a laugh. 
 
 B3 
 
10 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 Keleased from the durance of an unhappy 
 home, she soon gave way to the exuberance of 
 her girlish spirits. The united ages of the 
 bride and bridegroom did not amount to forty 
 years ; the hereditary legislator and dignified 
 peeress being in fact nothing more than an ill- 
 educated girl and boy, intent upon the pursuit 
 of selfish enjoyment. 
 
 Still, wherever they went, they made a fa- 
 vourable impression. Both were young and 
 ingenuous; Lady Hillingdon pretty in her 
 person, and Lord Hillingdon gentlemanly in 
 his manners. Emma, who persevered in her 
 intention of keeping as far as possible away 
 from Hindon after her marriage, made the 
 amende honorable to her parents by inviting 
 her next sister, Sophia, to pass the following 
 season with her in town, and promoting her 
 interests in life by exhibiting the charms of a 
 new Miss Corbet at balls, operas, and dejeu- 
 ners; while her lord, as keen a sportsman as 
 he had been an impassioned lover, rendered 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 11 
 
 Hillingdon Hall the pleasantest and most hos- 
 pitable seat in his native county ; accepted 
 the mastership of the hounds, and converted 
 his home into an hotel for the benefit of all 
 the fox-hunters of his acquaintance. 
 
 Thus engrossed, the husband by country 
 sports, the wife by London pleasures, they had 
 no leisure to regret the want of children, 
 during the first three years. But hounds and 
 hospitality, opera-boxes and fetes create 
 inroads into a larger income than that of Lord 
 Hillingdon. On the fourth season after their 
 union, though the Corbets (with two un- 
 married daughters to be quartered upon her) 
 represented the impossibility of Emma's re- 
 maining all the year round in Lancashire, 
 Lord Hillingdon represented with equal firm- 
 ness the impossibility of engaging a house in 
 London; and it was then that her ladyship 
 began, for the first time, to fancy that a 
 nursery might form an amusing occupation 
 for her leisure. Lord Hillingdon, absorbed in 
 
12 PEERS AND PAKVENUS. 
 
 field sports, could no longer be reckoned upon 
 as a companion ; and the neighbourhood being 
 a London-going neighbourhood, Emma had no 
 one, during the session or season, to whom she 
 could display her finery or unfold her gossip. 
 
 No sooner had she formed a wish for chil- 
 dren, than destiny, which seemed to take 
 delight in favouring her ambitions, announced 
 the prospect of an heir. Her lord, who had 
 begun to look with animosity upon a certain 
 Frank Joddrell, his cousin and heir presump- 
 tive, congratulated himself on the change of 
 family politics ; and in due time, midsummer 
 brought the promised olive-branch to Hilling- 
 don Hall, and the jaded posters the family 
 physician, to delight the young couple with 
 prognostications that the babe would be the 
 finest in the county, and an honour to their 
 ancient house. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 13 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Though the same sun, with all-diffusive rays, 
 Blush in the rose and in the diamond blaze, 
 We prize the efforts of his stronger power 
 
 And justly set the gem above the flower. 
 
 POPE. 
 
 ON the same midsummer afternoon that 
 witnessed the birth of an heir to the house 
 of Hillingdon, a day labourer who was assisting 
 to get in the hay of farmer Hobbs at Bilston, 
 was arrested by a ragged little girl of eleven 
 or twelve years old, with an entreaty that he 
 would hurry home, because " Mother was 
 poorly." 
 
 The helot was, of course, too conscious of 
 his duty to hurry home, or anywhere else, 
 while the farmer's hay-cart was waiting in the 
 
14 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 field, and the sky threatening over head. A 
 thunder-storm was evidently impending; and 
 the roar of old Hobbs's indignation would 
 have mingled with that of heaven's artillery, 
 had Richard Cleve presumed to leave his 
 work two hours before the appointed time. 
 The poor man desired his little girl therefore 
 to go and fetch neighbour Grabbin and the 
 parish doctor; entertaining no doubt that on 
 his arrival at home, after his work was done, 
 the event, of annual occurrence in his family, 
 would have yielded him a seventh child to 
 provide for, in addition to the half-dozen 
 already extant. He seemed to work the 
 harder on farmer Hobbs's account, in consi- 
 deration of the increasing wants] which such 
 an augmentation of his family must entail 
 upon himself. 
 
 Very little did poor Cleve anticipate that 
 the crisis which rendered him again a father, 
 was to render him a widower! As evening 
 came on, and the big drops of the storm fell 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 15 
 
 silently and heavily like tears from the sullen 
 sky upon the fragrant haycocks collected in 
 huge heaps in the meadow, there came a 
 second messenger one of his own ragged 
 boys inviting him (in a message from neigh- 
 bour Grabbin, rendered almost incomprehen- 
 sible by the breathless haste of the child) 
 to lose no time, for " the good 'oman was 
 badly." Five minutes afterwards, as he was 
 anxiously waiting the arrival of the farmer in 
 the meadow to obtain the leave of absence 
 which the coming rain rendered a matter of 
 so much moment, the rusty suit of the parish 
 doctor suddenly exhibited its professional 
 grimness at the gate; where, having beckoned 
 the husbandman from his toils, he added to 
 the intelligence that "all was over" the 
 apostrophe of " God's will be done : " 
 
 The sable practitioner seemed to fancy that 
 by this pious figure of speech he had intimated 
 the worst to Eichard Cleve. 
 
 "But Margery, sir?" persisted the poor 
 
16 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 man, doffing his straw hat to the man 
 scientific, in spite of the thickening rain- 
 drops, " Margery?" 
 
 " Your wife, my good fellow, is at rest." 
 
 " The best thing as could hap to her," 
 responded Cleve, believing the doctor to 
 announce that his patient was enjoying a 
 comfortable sleep ; " and if so be we was to 
 lose the babby, why we've children enow 
 already ; and, as your honour says, God's 
 will be done." 
 
 " Hasten home, then, to the house, my 
 good friend," added the doctor, gratified to 
 find the surviving moiety of his deceased 
 patient reconcile himself so readily to his 
 loss. "Neighbour Grabbin is sorely put to 
 it for help ; and the children are crying 
 round her for their mother." 
 
 Released -from all fear of his employer by 
 the doctor's injunction, Cleve trudged away 
 to his hovel, completely led astray by the 
 metaphorical genius of the too fine-spoken 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 17 
 
 apothecary. But on its very threshold, alas ! 
 he was startled by the frantic outcries of his 
 bereaved family ; and the first object that 
 met his view within was poor Margery, lying 
 with closed eyes upon her bed of anguish, 
 insensible for evermore to the wants and 
 troubles she had confronted with so brave 
 a spirit. The kisses of her younger children, 
 who had climbed up to wake her by their 
 endearments from that unnatural sleep, pro- 
 duced no change upon that death-cold 
 face ; and new-born twins, who were venting 
 their feeble cries on neighbour Grabbin's lap 
 in the adjoining shed, afforded a wretched 
 exchange to Richard Cleve for the kind, 
 frugal, industrious wife who had been a 
 blessing to his necessitous home. 
 
 He saw how it was. In the flurry of the 
 unexpected event, the nurse and doctor had 
 been intent only on the preservation of these 
 two wretched infants! Had he been there, 
 things would have been otherwise. The tender 
 
18 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 wife, the valuable mother, would not have 
 been neglected. Had he been there, Margery 
 might have been saved. But it was too late : 
 and, weak as a child and pale as ashes, the 
 strong man sank on his knees by the bedside ; 
 and took into his hard, sunburnt hands the cold 
 hand which daily labour, unremitting from 
 the cradle to the coffin, had rendered almost 
 as callous as his own. 
 
 Had an intruder of high degree sought 
 shelter at that moment in the cabin from 
 the storm that was raging without, he might 
 have moralized upon the destinies of one 
 whose childhood had never sported, whose 
 youth had never smiled, and whose maturity 
 had been a perpetual struggle with the 
 common wants of nature, not only in her 
 own person, but in those of the beings she 
 had brought into a world of woe. 
 
 But Richard Cleve was happily less com- 
 prehensive in his philosophy. He looked 
 upon her as she lay, calm and with an un- 
 
PEERS AND PAKVENUS. 19 
 
 wonted smile upon her care-worn countenance ; 
 and invoking her as the best of wives, mothers, 
 daughters, neighbours, Christians, felt that 
 the tears were wiped for ever from her face, 
 that her probation was past, that she had 
 entered into her rest, that she was crowned 
 with her crown of immortality. It was only 
 himself that he pitied ; himself and the eight 
 motherless children who were moaning around 
 him for comfort and for bread. 
 
 But what is called "the luxury of woe," 
 is no luxury for the million. It was not a 
 moment for sensibility. The dead and the 
 living alike claimed attendance ; the mo- 
 therless, foodless infants, the mother beyond 
 the reach of hunger or pain. Throughout 
 that stormy night, while the thunder roared, 
 and the blue lightning, flashing through 
 the casement upon the face of the dead, 
 overpowered the fleckering rushlight burning 
 between the bed of death and the wooden 
 cradle wherein the two helpless innocents 
 
20 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 were alternately placed, Richard Cleve forgot 
 his own sorrows while exerting himself for 
 the sake of those who had now no other 
 friend in the world. 
 
 At daybreak, he set forth to the workhouse 
 to ask a parish coffin for the good woman 
 whom, in her lifetime, his own labours had 
 not sufficed to maintain ; and to settle with 
 the overseers that on the morrow she should 
 be hid in the dust. For the poor, who 
 resign so much of which we take no account, 
 are denied even the solace of mourning. The 
 crowded cottage of the day-labourer is no 
 safe shelter for the ashes of the dead ; and 
 it was a relief, even to those who loved her, 
 when Margery Cleve was deposited in the 
 grave, and her survivors left at leisure to 
 bestow their whole attention upon those she 
 had left motherless. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 21 
 
 CHAP TEE III. 
 
 As those that are born to estates neglect industry and have 
 no business but to spend, he, being born to honour, believes 
 himself to be no further concerned than to consume and 
 waste it. BUTLER. 
 
 THE exclamations which, day after day, were 
 destined to delight the convalescence of Lady 
 Hillingdon, that her babe was the sweetest 
 of babes, her boy the most promising of boys, 
 were more founded on fact than is generally 
 the case where the infant is clothed in purple 
 and fine linen, and the mother, the lady of a lord. 
 
 Master Joddrell had been already baptized 
 by the then regal name of George ; baptized, 
 not christened ; for the christening of an heir 
 to a noble house is a matter of too much 
 moment to be hurried over at a moment's 
 notice, with only the parish priest to officiate, 
 
22 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 and the family to witness the officiation. 
 Though Mr Lechmere might do very well to 
 baptize the Honourable George, a bishop must 
 solemnize the rite where royalty was sponsor. 
 
 Ten months afterwards, therefore, when the 
 probability of a second accession to the family, 
 in the midst of the session, determined Lord 
 Hillingdon to engage for one more season a 
 house in town, the 'Morning Post' was au- 
 thorized to announce the grand celebration, 
 crowned by a banquet and ball, which rendered 
 the boy a Christian, and his nurse the proudest 
 of nurses. 
 
 On the point of becoming again a mother, 
 Lady Hillingdon lavished on this memorable 
 occasion all the fopperies and fineries which 
 maternal vanity could suggest ; and, whether 
 in St James's square or at Hillingdon Hall, 
 was careful to render the boy as much a source 
 of expense to his family, and trouble to those 
 who had the care of him, as the eldest son of 
 an aristocratic house has a right divine to be. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 23 
 
 It was astonishing, indeed, that such a su- 
 pererogation of pains rendered him neither sick 
 nor sorry, for a finer little fellow was never 
 seen ; and when, at six years old, he bestrode a 
 Shetland pony, of which the mane and tail 
 swept the fashionable dust of Hyde park, 
 every knowing groom and coachman of May- 
 fair turned round to applaud the ease and 
 spirit of Master JoddrelTs seat, and predict 
 that he would turn out the right thing, and 
 become " a good 'un" in time. 
 
 But, while the heir of the house of Hilling- 
 don was thus progressing, the house itself 
 exhibited considerable dilapidation. Ten years 
 of ill-assorted matrimony had deteriorated 
 the very nature of Emma and her husband. 
 Their uncultivated minds, like other desert 
 spots, were throwing up weeds and thistles. 
 At eight-and-twenty, Lady Hillingdon was 
 a flirt and a coquette, given over to vanity 
 and folly: while, at thirty, Lord Hillingdon 
 allowed his sportsmanship to degenerate into 
 
24 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 a profession. His lordship was now on the 
 turf. Tattersall's and the Jockey Club had 
 made him a London man, though Parliament 
 and the Corbet family could not. His days 
 and nights were now wasted in clubs and 
 betting-stands, training-stables and gun- 
 smiths' shops ; and every twentieth phrase 
 that proceeded from his lips included a bet. 
 
 If misery make a man acquainted with 
 strange bedfellows, horse-flesh makes him 
 familiar with still stranger. Hillingdon, at 
 the period of his marriage so gentlemanly in 
 his deportment, so select in his acquaintance, 
 was now the associate of grooms and scamps. 
 He had not courage to shrink from contact 
 with vices to which his follies were so 
 miserably akin ; and in pocket, as in repu- 
 tation, he was considerably out at elbows. 
 His income was dipped, his estates mort- 
 gaged. The fine ancestral oaks of Hillingdon 
 Hall were gone ; and (as Mrs Corbet often 
 remarked to her husband in the frequent 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 25 
 
 bursts of indignation at the disregard with 
 which they were treated by Lord and Lady 
 Hillingdon, the old house was beginning to 
 look like a manufactory, standing alone in 
 the centre of the naked park. There was 
 something, indeed, almost amounting to exul- 
 tation in the tone in which she compared its 
 manifest degradation with the flourishing pros- 
 perity of Shrub's Hill, the seat of the thriv- 
 ing merchant by whom their second daughter, 
 Sophia, had been raised to the presidency of 
 one of the most high-gilt mansions of Portland 
 place, and one of the snuggest properties in 
 the money-growing county of Surrey. 
 
 " What are you going to do with yourself, 
 this autumn ?" demanded Mrs Corbet of 
 Lady Hillingdon, on the eve of departing for 
 Hindon Manor, after a season spent in at- 
 tempting, on a reduced scale, for her two 
 younger daughters, the system of London 
 manoeuvring which had succeeded so well for 
 their elder sisters. 
 
 VOL. I. C 
 
26 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 " I hardly know," was her ladyship's 
 languid reply; " Hillingdon is off to the 
 moors. From thence, he will proceed to 
 Doncaster, and the October meeting. So I 
 think I shall get through my time at Cowes, 
 till it is time for Brighton." 
 
 " You have no idea, then, of going into 
 Lancashire this year ?" 
 
 " Neither this year, nor any other, so long 
 as I can avoid it. The place is so dull, and 
 the people so discontented ! One never hears 
 of anything at Hillingdon but distress ! " 
 
 " Distress which, if on the spot, you might 
 perhaps alleviate ! " retorted her mother. 
 
 " I have no pretension to set up as a re- 
 dresser of national grievances. I prefer Cowes. 
 The children want bathing, and Lady Ursula 
 Wainwright will be there (Captain Wain wright 
 has just got into the yacht club) ; after which, 
 we all remove to Brighton for the winter." 
 
 " Not yet tired of Brighton ! " was Mrs 
 Corbet's peevish rejoinder. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 27 
 
 " On the contrary, I like it better every 
 year. Where is one half so well amused, in 
 the way of winter residence ? Hillingdon will 
 be at Melton, and I must divert myself dur- 
 ing his absence as well as I can. Besides, I 
 want to put George to school ; George is 
 growing the plague of the house ! " 
 
 " And of every other he enters ! " added his 
 unmerciful grandmamma. " But I would not 
 give much for the improvement he is likely to 
 derive from a Brighton preparatory school." 
 
 " Everybody's eldest son goes to a Brighton 
 preparatory school now ; and what else could 
 I possibly do with him ?" 
 
 " Send him at once to Eton. George is 
 eleven years old, and ought " 
 
 " To run the risk of being killed by way 
 of being made hardy?" interrupted Lady 
 Hillingdon. " No, no ! Mr Dawdle's is just 
 the place for a boy fresh from the hands of 
 the nursery governess ; and, two years hence, 
 when he is a little more advanced (for at 
 
 c 2 
 
28 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 present, thanks to Mademoiselle Mathilde r s 
 inattention, he scarcely knows how to read), 
 it will be time enough for Eton. He has a 
 capital seat, and was out on his pony, with 
 the buckhounds, several times last year ; and, 
 I quite agree with Hillingdon, that it is time 
 enough for all the rest of his education." 
 
 Grandmamma, if of a different way of think- 
 ing, avoided useless contention by holding her 
 peace. But the principles of the Keverend 
 Dickinson Dawdle so thoroughly coincided 
 with those of the mother of his new pupil, 
 that George Joddrell found the silver rule of 
 the preparatory school quite as supportable 
 as that of Mademoiselle Mathilde. He learnt 
 no more than he liked, and he liked to learn 
 nothing at all. His half holidays were con- 
 verted into whole ones : and his holidays, 
 semi or entire, being passed at home (where 
 he rode on the downs with Captain Wain- 
 wright and danced through the juvenile fetes 
 of a Brighton winter, which lasts from Sep- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 29 
 
 tember till May), at thirteen years of age, 
 when sentenced by his father to Eton, George 
 had managed to forget, under his fashionable 
 tutor, the little learning previously acquired 
 under the thread-paper government of the 
 nursery governess. 
 
 But George had been imbibing, in the in- 
 terim, other lessons than those conned in a 
 primer or gradus. While his sisters Mary 
 and Agatha remained immured in the school- 
 room, the son and heir was a guest at his 
 father's dinner table, a loiterer in his mother's 
 boudoir; where that worldly knowledge which 
 never can be attained too 'late, had become as 
 familiar to the man-boy as to the most ex- 
 perienced lounger of St James's street. The 
 dissoluteness of his father's boon companions 
 was not only fully unveiled to him, but all 
 the shabbiness of the prodigal all the mean 
 evasions of the roue. George was accustomed 
 to hear it made a matter of wonder, how 
 such a fellow " got on" how such another 
 
30 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 would " get off;" and to admire by what 
 paltry shifts men with five hundred per annum 
 achieve the expenditure of five thousand, 
 without forfeiting their life to the laws, or 
 (which was accounted of more importance in 
 the circle in which he moved) their place 
 in society. 
 
 But while thus indulging in excesses be- 
 yond his scope of enjoyment, the life of the 
 pampered child was far from happy. The 
 home of an embarrassed family is distracted 
 by a thousand feuds, and rendered comfort- 
 less by a thousand discrepancies. It was not 
 alone the negligence of servants and imperti- 
 nence of tradespeople which demonstrated that 
 scarcely a fourth of Lord Hillingdon's nominal 
 twenty thousand a year remained at his dis- 
 posal, to meet the expenses of his original 
 establishment. The father, a disappointed gam- 
 bler, the mother, a faded coquette, des- 
 titute of resources in their own minds to 
 meet the reverses of fortune their imprudence 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 31 
 
 had created, were peevish and resentful, even 
 with their favourite child. His boyish faults 
 were either disregarded or resisted with un- 
 due violence ; and he was alternately ca- 
 ressed as a toy, worshipped as an heir, and 
 spurned as the scape-goat of indigestion and 
 discontent. 
 
 His mind corrupted, and his heart hard- 
 ened by such a system of education, the 
 boy had long ceased to care for anything 
 but himself. While catering for his plea- 
 sures as cunningly as an egotist of five-and- 
 thirty, he was a scientific epicure at an age 
 when other lads are susceptible of only hunger 
 and thirst ; and on arriving at Eton, was 
 welcomed by acclamation into the most ex- 
 clusive coterie of the juvenile exclusives, 
 and degraded to the lowest post of juvenile 
 duncehood. Though a child, he was noticed 
 by the " Eton men." But among the Eton 
 boys, he passed for a sad blockhead. 
 
32 PEEKS AND PAKVENUS. 
 
 CHAPTEK IV. 
 
 To know, and by knowledge lift up the mind from the dun- 
 geon of the body to the enjoying of its own divine essence, 
 is the grand object of learning. Sir P. SIDNEY. 
 
 THE life of Richard Cleve and his family, 
 meanwhile, was a perpetual struggle. Even 
 with parish help, for to parish help the father 
 of eight hungering children is forced to have 
 recourse, it was a hard matter to bear up 
 against the winter's cold, the summer's neces- 
 sities. The difficulty of supplying even the 
 scantiest food and raiment to so large a num- 
 ber, was an anxiety that would have kept the 
 husbandman's pillow sleepless, had not hard 
 labour relieved its own exertions by yielding 
 untroubled rest. Nature stood the poor man's 
 friend. He lay down on his flock bed when 
 the night time came, and in five minutes was 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 33 
 
 asleep; dreaming of summer sunshine, green 
 pastures, fertile corn-fields, plenty and peace ; 
 undisturbed by the nightmare and restless- 
 ness entailed on Lord Hillingdon by his 
 French cook and half-dozen entrees; and 
 ready to rise and devour, with renovated 
 appetite, the morsel of home -baked bread 
 constituting his frugal breakfast. 
 
 But Cleve's household, humble as it was, 
 was regulated with decency. A widowed 
 sister, poor as himself, had taken up her 
 abode with him to bring up his motherless 
 children; an industrious woman, who, if un- 
 able to render much assistance to their learn- 
 ing, did wonders for their moral education by 
 teaching them to suffer with patience, labour 
 with diligence, and exercise the first great 
 social duty, to bear and forbear. Scanty as 
 was their food, they were instructed to consider 
 it a blessing worthy of thanksgiving; hard 
 as was their bed, it was consecrated by a 
 
 nightly prayer for the protection of heaven. 
 
 c 3 
 
34 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 It was not often that Cleve or aunt Morris 
 grew impatient with the children. Cleve felt 
 he had no right to visit upon his orderly, sub- 
 missive family, the poverty they had no 
 voluntary share in creating. A warm-hearted 
 man, he loved the little harmless souls that 
 looked up to him for bread; and hard as it 
 sometimes was to provide it, would have 
 lamented the loss of one of those curly -headed 
 ragamuffins from his board, as truly as any 
 parent able to lavish the good things of this 
 world upon a petted favourite. 
 
 There were two, however, among his off- 
 spring, who afforded a considerable addition 
 to the cares and crosses of aunt Morris: 
 Dick, the eldest boy, who, in spite of all her 
 admonitions, displayed an uneradicable pro- 
 pensity to idleness and truancy; and little 
 Jervis, the youngest of poor Margery's fatal 
 twins. Providence had relieved the needy 
 household of the still more weakly brother; 
 but Jervis struggled on, puny, fretful, 
 
PEERS AND PAKVENUS. 35 
 
 miserable, a burthen to all, a comfort to 
 none. A sickly child is a grievance even in 
 the most prosperous household. What is it 
 in the crowded hovel of the labouring poor? 
 
 Time, however, did its worst and best for 
 the family. Three years after his mother's 
 death, Dick Cleve, after being apprenticed by 
 the parish to a shoemaker less indulgent than 
 his father, took his final departure from Bil- 
 ston, leaving behind no blacker stain on his 
 character than that of being an incorrigible 
 idler ; while Jervis attained sufficient strength 
 of body and intelligence of mind, to dispense 
 with the unremitting personal attendance of 
 one of his sisters. The two eldest were out at 
 service with neighbouring farmers. There 
 remained at home, besides the sickly twin, 
 only his sister Jane, a year older; and Jack 
 and Jem, two lads of ten and twelve, who 
 assisted their father in his task- work, and were 
 not more troublesome than they could help to 
 the rest of the family. 
 
36 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 Jervis and Jane were thus left to enjoy 
 together such pastimes and pleasures of child- 
 hood as are within reach of the penniless. 
 But these are perhaps more numerous than 
 the many-pennied take into account. Cleve's 
 cottage was situated at the base of a ridge 
 of chalky downs, just where a green platform 
 of verdure, rising above the margin of a rapid 
 brook, afforded space for the site of a small 
 compact village ; of which an ancient flint- 
 built church formed the apex, and Cleve's 
 miserable tenement, with its garden sloping 
 towards the brook, the humble base. A 
 ragged copse skirted the village towards the 
 east ; while westward, between the church- 
 yard and the precipitous hills, lay a small 
 green, the holiday-home of the village, 
 fringed on one side by the lime-trees of the 
 churchyard ; and ornamented by a single 
 spreading oak-tree, apparently coeval with 
 the church itself; somewhat staghorned in- 
 deed, but extending the massive shade of its 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 37 
 
 lower branches halfway across the green, as 
 if to protect the sports of the village children. 
 
 But Bilston Green was not the favourite 
 resort of the little Cleves. Conscious of his 
 feebleness, poor Jervis was not fond of con- 
 sorting with the hardy throng ; and no sooner 
 was he of an age to roam unheeded, than he 
 prevailed upon his docile blue-eyed Jenny to 
 abandon the old oak and smooth grave-stones 
 of the churchyard for the open downs, or the 
 furzy, heathy paths of Bilston Copse. Never 
 apart, the little ragged wanderers were met 
 at all hours, eager and sprightly, in these 
 lonely ways. For with a wood and a brook, 
 abounding in birds, insects, fishes, wild 
 flowers, wild fruit, fine air and liberty, what 
 child has not wherewithal to be happy? 
 
 But while Jervis Cleve found sufficient oc- 
 cupation for a summer's day in watching the 
 nest in the sloe-bush, the gossamer wings 
 flitting among the water-weeds, the bul- 
 rushes in blossom, the blind mole at his 
 
38 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 work, or the wild bee at her pastime, his 
 father predicted evil days in store for the 
 sickly child. His wan cheeks and feeble 
 gestures rendered it apparent to the hard- 
 working parent that "they should never make 
 a man of him;" that is, a man according to 
 the appreciation of the hewers of wood and 
 drawers of water. Neither Richard nor 
 aunt Morris regarded the poor child they had 
 reared with so much care, the less for his 
 infirmities ; nor was the pity evinced towards 
 Jervis by Jem the cowboy, and Jack the 
 hedger and ditcher, overpoweringly tinged 
 with contempt. Still, they admitted within 
 the boy's hearing and elsewhere, that " Jervy 
 would never earn his livelihood, that there 
 was nothing to be done with him, that if 
 his father were taken from him, he must 
 away to the poor-house with little Jane;" and 
 Jervis was already aware that he was as un- 
 available to the sole purposes of existence 
 with which he was acquainted, as the blear- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 39 
 
 eyed old women and drivelling old men whom 
 he saw tottering occasionally out of the hateful 
 gateway marked by village reprobation as the 
 place where pauper bread is grudgingly doled 
 out to the useless classes of the community. 
 
 But though humbled, the little fellow was 
 not humiliated by the fact. He knew that 
 his sickliness was an infliction, not a fault; 
 and as the mighty will which condemned him 
 to be a cripple, was the same which bestowed 
 upon him the golden summer with its glories, 
 the atmosphere alive with the song of birds, 
 and fragrant with the breath of flowers, he 
 trusted he had a friend in his inscrutable chas- 
 tizer, that there might be compensations 
 yet in store. But how were these amended 
 destinies to be accomplished? 
 
 At that time, the cry for educating the 
 poor had not gone forth in the land. Like 
 other valuable acts of reform, it is the growth 
 of the present century. Bilston had its dame- 
 school indeed, and the dame-school its dozen 
 
40 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 or score of scholars, according to the rise 
 and fall of village prosperity. But the 
 Cleves had never risen to the grandeur 
 of school-goers. From Dick the runaway to 
 poor Jervis, they were guiltless of all learn- 
 ing save what is to be conned in the woods 
 and fields. When lo ! just as Jervis attained 
 his tenth year, and forfeited his dearest hap- 
 piness in life by the necessity that Jane, at 
 twelve years old, should renounce her summer 
 rambles, and lend her aid to the household 
 labours of aunt Morris, Squire Hecksworth 
 of Bilston Hall, a family seat about a mile 
 from the village, brought home with him a 
 wife, who (in spite of the opposition of the 
 superannuated curate representing the plu- 
 ralist incumbent) thought proper to amuse 
 the leisure of her early married life, by set- 
 ting up a Sunday School. 
 
 Mrs Hecksworth was an amiable young 
 woman, disposed to do her best in this world, 
 in the hope of enjoying her best in the next : 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 41 
 
 as yet undamped in her ardour for improve- 
 ment by the disappointments awaiting all 
 reformers of existing abuses. But like most 
 young people, she required a too immediate 
 fruition of her labours. She allowed no time 
 for the working of her system. No sooner 
 was her school-house built, and supplied with 
 master, mistress, and horn-books, than she 
 expected that the orchards of Bilston Hall 
 would cease to be robbed; that there would 
 be no more playing at chuckfarthing in the 
 churchyard, no more pelting of Farmer 
 Hobbs's ducks in the pond ! 
 
 But unless so desirable a consummation 
 could be accomplished by the mere exterior 
 of the four-and-twenty well-varnished, calf- 
 bound testaments, which the squire's lady 
 had sent for from town to await the future 
 scholarship of her protege's, it was diffi- 
 cult to imagine on what she grounded 
 her expectations. At present, nothing was 
 accomplished by her attempt but to render 
 
42 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 a couple of dozen happy village-children sulky 
 and discontented. The^ path of learning, 
 even when rolled and watered, rarely proves 
 attractive to the feet of ingenuous youth; 
 still less, the peremptory charity school, with 
 its briery, miry ways. Poor Mrs Hecks- 
 worth, while presiding over the weekly cate- 
 chism, prepared to meet with grateful smiles 
 and prompt intelligence, was grievously har- 
 assed by the sullenness of the dirty, stupid, 
 ill-conditioned brats she had undertaken to 
 train into Newtons and Hannah Mores. The 
 boys scratched their heads when she addressed 
 them; the girls trod on her toes when she 
 caressed them ; and instead of the picturesque 
 position the inexperienced matron had pro- 
 posed to herself, after the model of some 
 Pieta by Vandyke, or marble effigy of " melt- 
 ing Charity" by Roubilliac, she was revolted 
 by the nastiness of her cherubs ; and actually 
 fainted one sultry Sunday in July, oppressed by 
 the unsavoury vapours of her rural Lyceum. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 43 
 
 It happened that the little urchin whose 
 ready zeal supplied his benefactress with a 
 cup of water on this ominous occasion, was 
 the same pale-faced child, whose mild dark 
 eyes she had so often found fixed upon her 
 own, when administering reproof or exhor- 
 tation to the class. For, while Mrs Hecks- 
 worth shrank from contact with the squalid 
 practical misery she had summoned around 
 her, her own graceful person, and rich attire, 
 exercised a spell of enchantment over the 
 children. Some wondered at her, some 
 envied her, some almost hated her for her 
 supernatural elegance. But Jervis Cleve 
 worshipped her, as the patriarchs may have 
 worshipped those angel guests who walked 
 with them side by side upon the earth. Im- 
 bued with that passionate love of beauty en- 
 gendered by early and undisturbed contem- 
 plation of the works of nature, the lovely and 
 refined woman was to him as a revealed divi- 
 nity. He sometimes crept near enough to 
 
44 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 touch the hem of a garment, which, as poor 
 Hood describes it, 
 
 Seemed wove of lily leaves, 
 It was so pure and fine ! 
 
 He even followed her footsteps at a dis- 
 tance, as she crossed the green, on her way 
 to the fine carriage drawn up in the shade, to 
 inhale the perfume of violets emitted by her 
 dress ; and when he saw her turn so deathly 
 pale and sink back in her chair, the tears 
 gathered in his dark eyes as he flew to 
 his father's neighbouring cottage, to obtain 
 from aunt Morris the only restorative 
 within his reach. 
 
 From that day, Jervis Cleve became a 
 favourite with Mrs Hecksworth. His fa- 
 ther was spoken to. He was employed on 
 week days to weed the garden at the Hall ; 
 and the lady occasionally stopped there in 
 her summer evening walk, even after that 
 walk was accompanied by a lovely infant 
 of her own, to bestow a kind word upon 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 45 
 
 the sickly boy, for whom she had pro- 
 vided the sole occupation for which he was 
 capable. At one time, she proposed to take 
 him into the gardener's house, as a per- 
 manent servant. But here, the squire wisely 
 interfered ; reminding her, not only that 
 young Cleve would never attain sufficient 
 strength to fulfil the harder tasks of such 
 a calling ; but that the reading, writing, 
 and ciphering he had acquired with such 
 remarkable facility, might hereafter qualify 
 him for a higher as well as more appro- 
 priate vocation. 
 
 " Tomlinson the schoolmaster tells me the 
 lad is a wonder for his years," observed 
 Mr Hecksworth " he seems to have run 
 away with the faculties of the whole vil- 
 lage ; for a stupider little set of oafs than 
 your scholars, my dear, I really never 
 
 saw." 
 
 "It is not the education bestowed upon 
 
46 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 them that has rendered them so," replied 
 his wife, pettishly. 
 
 " Nor is it Tomlinson's teaching which 
 made your infirm boy a genius." 
 
 " It has made him fitter to support the 
 calamities of his condition," remonstrated 
 the lady. 
 
 " I doubt it. But no matter ! I am 
 not going to fight our battles over again 
 upon that point," said he. 
 
 " And pray what battles have you and 
 Maria been fighting ?" inquired Mrs Hecks- 
 worth's brother, Sir William Davenport, who 
 during the foregoing discussion had been 
 absorbed in the perusal of the morning , 
 paper, as they all sat together in the library 
 at Bilston Hall. 
 
 " Education, or no education." 
 
 " Education of the poor ? Ay, ay ! 
 Maria's a theorist ; Maria's an enlighten- 
 ment-arian ! Much' good may it do her!" 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 47 
 
 cried Sir William, a stanch Tory of the 
 times when Toryism and darkness were over 
 the land. 
 
 " It will do her good ! I never doubted 
 the good which Maria herself would derive 
 from the exercise of her charitable impulses," 
 observed the squire, in fond vindication of 
 his pretty wife ; " the question is what 
 good it will do the poor children she is 
 cramming with accomplishments. In my 
 opinion, you might as well stuff a green 
 goose with pearls ! We've got a poor sickly 
 lad here in the garden, whom the school- 
 master swears is a genius ; and who, some 
 day or other, no doubt, will be borrowing 
 Simson's Euclid off the shelf yonder with- 
 out leave ; and forgetting to return it, in- 
 stead of watering her geraniums." 
 
 " You conceive, then, that reading the Bible 
 will undermine his principles ?" 
 
 "The Bible was read to him, from the 
 
48 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 pulpit, from the moment lie had ears to hear. 
 But I question whether " 
 
 " Did you not promise, just now, not to 
 fight over again that often fought battle ?" 
 interrupted his wife with a smile. " No- 
 thing you can say will induce me to believe 
 that I have injured my prote'ge ; and if, in 
 the sequel, he should prove competent to hold 
 a situation more fitted to him than the day- 
 labours beyond his strength " 
 
 " Pray how old's the boy ?" abruptly in- 
 quired Sir William Davenport. 
 
 " Nearly fourteen. He is one of seven 
 children of a hard-working day-labourer, 
 a pains-taking, quick-witted little fellow, of 
 excellent disposition. No one has a word to 
 say against him, except that he is puny and 
 undersized." 
 
 " In that case, Maria," interrupted the 
 blunt baronet, " I shall have a presenta- 
 tion next month for Fairford free school, 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 49 
 
 as far as learning goes, as good as Eton or 
 Harrow. If I'd a son of my own, I wouldn't 
 mind sending him there, capital foundation, 
 exhibitions to both universities ! and if you 've 
 a mind to go to a trifle of expense in fitting 
 out your prote'ge, the presentation's yours. I'd 
 nobody in my eye for it but one of my 
 butler's sons a sad lout, not likely to do 
 me or himself credit ; and by good luck, 
 I've never dropped a word to Corkscrew of my 
 intentions." 
 
 Such an offer was only to be accepted with 
 gratitude. The heart of Mrs Hecksworth 
 rejoiced, not alone for charity's sake, but in the 
 hope that her sick boy's advancement would 
 tend to support her theories against the 
 inconvincability of her husband ; and on the 
 morrow, the squire's lady proceeded in state 
 to the village, to announce the good news to 
 the Cleves. 
 
 But for the second time in her career of 
 beneficence, Mrs Hecksworth was fated to dis- 
 
 VOL. I. D 
 
50 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 appointment ! Instead of finding her propo- 
 sition received with ecstasies by the boy, 
 and thankfulness by the whole family, aunt 
 Morris listened unmoved to the recapitulation 
 of the advantages awaiting him, while Jenny 
 retreated into the darkest corner of the cot- 
 tage, to dry her eyes with her apron. Even 
 Jervis seemed in despair. 
 
 " You see, my lady,' 7 faltered aunt Morris, 
 when at length she recovered her surprise 
 sufficient to command her powers of utter- 
 ance, " this last lad be all the comfort 
 poor Richard's got left in the world. Dick, 
 what runn'd away, has never been heard 
 of. Jack be gone a-hedging in the low coun- 
 try, and Jem be working at the mill at 
 Bewchester, a matter of four mile off. Both 
 lasses be in sarvice in Lon'on town ; and not 
 a soul have we got about the place, to do a 
 turn for us, but poor Jervy ! Jervy looks 
 to the garden, at odd times, and does what 
 mendin's wantin' to the furnitur'. Brother's 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 51 
 
 never chose to set his face again schoolin' 
 and the like, first 'ecause 'twas got for 
 nothing, and did no harm to nubbody ; and 
 next, 'ecause we never lost sight of the lad. 
 But as to sending him two days' journey across 
 the country, to a factoring town like Fair- 
 ford, to lose his health, maybe, and get 
 out of sight of work " 
 
 Again, Mrs Hecks worth condescended to 
 inform her that Fairford was only distant 
 forty miles from Bilston. 
 
 " And that's a two-day foot distance," in- 
 terposed] aunt Morris, contemplating only 
 her own occasional visits to her favourite 
 nephew. Even the worldly advantages con- 
 tingent on the purposed presentation, recapi- 
 tulated by the benefactress, were Hebrew- 
 Greek to the old woman ; nor could Jenny, 
 who stood listening afar off, bring herself to 
 understand how languages no longer talked on 
 the habitable globe were to be made available 
 
 to her poor brother. 
 
 D 2 
 
52 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 Even Jervis Cleve, when admitted to the 
 conference, began to struggle visibly with 
 contending emotions. The lad's attachment 
 to his native village partook of the pas- 
 sionate nature of his temperament. Bilston, 
 with its woods and waters, was to him 
 as the very breath of his being. For him, 
 there was no world elsewhere ! He could 
 conjecture no other brook than the clear 
 stream rattling over the shallows below their 
 garden-hedge ; no other copse than the wil- 
 derness of golden furze and birch and maple 
 bushes, skirting that brawling stream. No- 
 thing in the wide world could be so beautiful 
 as Bilston ; and as to Fairford, he had heard 
 of it as a region of smoke and filth, whose 
 grim-visaged inhabitants scarcely resembled 
 the human kind. 
 
 The boy was not at present susceptible 
 of the master- workings of ambition. The 
 seed of emulation was not yet sown. He 
 knew nothing of worldly distinctions. He 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 53 
 
 knew not even the extent of his own igno- 
 rance. Reading and writing constituted in 
 his estimation the height of mental accom- 
 plishment. All the poetry he wot of lay in 
 the hedge of hawthorn, and the hyssop on 
 the wall ; and Squire Hecksworth's head- 
 gardener was in his eyes as great a man as 
 the Archbishop of Canterbury in those of the 
 grey-headed curate. 
 
 The only thing to reconcile his mind to 
 his good fortune, was the fact that it ema- 
 nated from Madam Hecksworth. But then, 
 it was to exile him from the presence of his be- 
 nefactress , and deprive him of the honourable 
 preferment of weeding her garden ! It was 
 plain, the squire's lady regarded him with 
 ill-will; or she would not drive him forth 
 from her garden of Eden ! 
 
 For a moment, indeed, she felt almost in- 
 clined to exile him from her presence in 
 right earnest. The impenetrable stupidity of 
 the whole family was too provoking ! Still, 
 
54 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 allowance must be made for their ignorance 
 of the good intended ; and when, at length, 
 Richard Cleve plodded home from work, 
 to give ear to the lady's arguments, 
 and understand just so much as that 
 Jervis was to be no further expense or 
 trouble to his family, but to be put in 
 the way of earning good bread for himself 
 and them, he issued his paternal decree ; 
 and lo! five weeks afterwards, young Cleve 
 laid his throbbing head and swollen eyes 
 upon the truckle-bed of the college dor- 
 mitory of Fairford School. 
 
 His foot was on the first round of the 
 ladder of preferment ! 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 55 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Hee knowes no manne that is not generally knowne. His wit, 
 like the marigold, openeth with the sunne, and therefore 
 he riseth not before twelve of the clock. Hee putteth more 
 confidence in his wordes than meaning ; and in his pro- 
 nuntiation than in his wordes. Hee followes nothing but 
 inconstancie, honours nothing but fortune. Loves nothing. 
 The sustenance of his discourse is newes ; and his censure, 
 like a shot, depends upon the charging. 
 
 SIB THOMAS OVERBURT. 
 
 " UPON my life, Sophy, your nephew seems 
 to be going it at a famous rate ! " observed 
 Mr Clutterbuck, of Portland place, to his wife, 
 one morning at breakfast, as he laid aside the 
 ' Morning Post,' which, among other " fashion- 
 able movements," was pleased to chronicle the 
 doings and misdoings of the Hon. George 
 Joddrell. 
 
 " What has he been doing now ?" inquired 
 Mrs Clutterbuck, little suspecting how much 
 importance was imparted to the young roue in 
 
56 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 the estimation of her two daughters, Emma 
 and Caroline, by these recitals of his wild 
 exploits. 
 
 "Oh! nothing particular, nothing worth 
 speaking of; only smashed the carriage of 
 the Dean of Buckingham, in driving the 
 Oxford mail into town, along the Uxbridge 
 road." 
 
 " No great harm in that ! " said Mrs Clutter- 
 buck, coolly. " In his rank of life, one can't 
 expect him to grow up a milk-sop ! " 
 
 " By all accounts, brandy-sop would be 
 nearer the mark!" replied Mr Clutterbuck. 
 " Lord and Lady Hillingdon have a world to 
 answer for, in the way they have reared that 
 young man! Though their recent accession 
 of fortune has set them afloat for a time, we 
 all know it can't last; and then what's to 
 become of this hopeful of their 's? He is fit 
 for nothing absolutely nothing but to drive 
 mail-coaches; and will scarcely choose to 
 get his living in that line of business ! " 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 57 
 
 " Get his living !" echoed Mrs Clutterbuck, 
 shrugging her shoulders. " What an expres- 
 sion ! Who would suppose, my dear, that you 
 were alluding to the heir of one of the most 
 ancient peerages in the kingdom?" 
 
 " I wish his ancient peerage were likely to 
 give him salt to his porridge ! " retorted the 
 husband. 
 
 " At all events," said Mrs Clutterbuck, 
 pettishly, " if Lord Hillingdon's fortune should 
 be a little injured by the turf " 
 
 " The turf and every other species of wanton 
 extravagance," added Clutterbuck. 
 
 " He will be able, at any time, to provide 
 suitably for his son. Nothing would be 
 easier than for Lord Hillingdon to get him a 
 diplomatic appointment." 
 
 " And nothing more difficult than to per- 
 suade his son to accept it ! " 
 
 " Necessity would soon compel him to do 
 something for himself." 
 
 " Just now, my love, you maintained that 
 
 D 3 
 
58 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 no necessity existed ! But granted even that 
 Lord Hillingdon applied to government, and 
 that government felt obliged to requite the 
 slavishness of his vote for the last ten years, 
 what place is this idle, ignorant, flighty, use- 
 less, young man, in any way qualified to 
 hold?" 
 
 " My cousin George speaks Italian and 
 German like a native!" interposed Emma 
 Clutterbuck. 
 
 " And because he can parrot a few phrases, 
 caught from his courier, do you fancy him fit 
 for an ambassador?" retorted her father. " I 
 will answer for it, the scurviest pen-mender in 
 the Foreign office would put his inefficiency to 
 the blush!" 
 
 " Emma does not mean that George's abili- 
 ties alone would obtain him preferment," 
 persisted mamma. " She has seen in the 
 instance of your brothers, her excellent uncles, 
 that abilities alone, unsupported by connexion, 
 are a mere drug in the market. But she 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 59 
 
 justly supposes that with George's pretensions 
 and distinguished appearance, he is likely to 
 make some figure in the world." 
 
 " His pretensions I never disputed. As to 
 his getting on in the world, I fancy it will be 
 exactly at the rate of fourteen miles an hour, 
 and on a coach-box." 
 
 " I know not why we trouble ourselves 
 about his progress," cried Mrs Clutterbuck, 
 with kindling eyes. " George is in no want 
 of our patronage. He does not come near the 
 house above once in six months." 
 
 " He might double the length of his absence 
 without my missing him ! " rejoined her hus- 
 band. And when his daughters presumed 
 to side with their mother, in defence of their 
 fashionable cousin, he peremptorily ordered 
 them out of the room. 
 
 There was certainly little beside the bond 
 of kindred blood to promote a good under- 
 standing between George Joddrell and his rich 
 and vulgar relations. 
 
60 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 Once or twice in his summer vacations, 
 indeed, when cantering along Portland place 
 to keep an appointment with some Life Guards' 
 chum in the Regent's park, he had recalled 
 to mind that certain of his mother's kinsfolk 
 had pitched their tents in that stony desert, 
 and condescended to bait a quarter of an 
 hour in the house; enchanting his aunt by 
 his air of fashion, and his cousins by his tone 
 of superlative impertinence. 
 
 Still, there was something in George that 
 even Clutterbuck himself, the sturdy uncom- 
 promising inonied man, could not treat with 
 personal slight. The edge of the glittering 
 article of fashionable hardware was too keen to 
 be trifled with. The substance might not be 
 deep, but the surface was polished into a 
 mirror that reflected the defects and pecu- 
 liarities of others so vividly as to make them 
 turn away abashed. Insolently satirical, the 
 easy assurance of his sarcasms did but increase 
 their bitterness. Not a person upon earth of 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 61 
 
 whom he stood in awe ! It is an afflicting result 
 of the misconduct provoking the contempt of 
 children towards their parents, that the first 
 great duty of filial respect being infringed, 
 no after-deference can be called into existence. 
 Nature provides, for the good order of society, 
 that unlimited veneration shall be testified by 
 the child to the parents ; and the child who 
 has once felt itself superior to the author of 
 its being, feels thenceforward superior to all 
 the world! After despising his father and 
 mother, a man will scarcely even " fear God," 
 or u honour the king." 
 
 This contempt of all things, human and 
 divine, was an evil which the Hillingdons 
 themselves had entailed upon their son. It 
 was not in the nature of things for the young 
 man to look up with reverence to the gambler 
 and horse-jockey, whose soul was engrossed by 
 his club and stud; a man whose word was 
 disputed by all whose incredulity was beneath 
 the convincing arguments of a duelling pistol ; 
 
62 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 and whose embarrassments he heard sneered 
 at in places of resort where father and son 
 should never meet or be named together ! 
 
 Nor was it possible to regard with much 
 filial affection a woman who left every sacred 
 duty of nature unfulfilled ; who was no 
 wife to her husband, no mother to her 
 daughters, no mistress to her family ; whose 
 extravagance had doubled the embarrass- 
 ments of Lord Hillingdon, and whose levity 
 diminished his respectability. Young Joddrell 
 had every pretext that a man not right- 
 minded can entertain, to look down upon his 
 parents. Even the sort of boyish predilec- 
 tion which, in spite of all, he did cherish for 
 his mother, originated in admiration of her 
 elegance and a recognition of her foolish in- 
 dulgence of his follies, rather than in any 
 worthier sentiment. 
 
 For, amid various indiscretions, the passion 
 of Lady Hillingdon for her son remained 
 predominant. She would have done anything 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 63 
 
 on earth for George, except deny herself the 
 smallest selfish indulgence. Glorying in his 
 personal distinctions, and the singular shrewd- 
 ness which enabled him to evade the well- 
 merited stigma of ignorance, she looked 
 upon him as destined, in spite of mortgaged 
 estates, encumbered property, and rustication 
 at the University, to retrieve the fallen 
 credit of the family. 
 
 Her daughters, meanwhile, though past the 
 usual age for being introduced into society, 
 had not yet been presented: Lady Hilling- 
 don making the delicacy of her health a pre- 
 text for avoiding the glare of the great world, 
 to which she did not choose to exhibit her 
 altered face and tarnished splendour. 
 
 But the girls never repined. Mary and 
 Agatha Joddrell had been so fortunate, 
 while languishing under the neglect of their 
 parents, as to fall into the hands of a go- 
 verness qualified to supply the place of the 
 best of mothers, and incited by heartfelt 
 
64 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 compassion to perform towards them more 
 than the ordinary duties of her calling. She 
 made them not only accomplished, but good 
 and happy. Born to better prospects in life, 
 Mrs Fairfax had been schooled by the bitter 
 lessons of adversity; and foreseeing for the 
 girls under her charge a destiny more check- 
 ered than usually awaits the daughters of a 
 peer of the realm, had prepared them to meet 
 undismayed the storms of life, rather than 
 to remain undazzled by its sunshine. 
 
 It is true that, during the reign of Mrs 
 Fairfax in the school-room, prolonged by the 
 inertness of Lady Hillingdon till Agatha was 
 eighteen years of age, she was frequently re- 
 proached by her ladyship with incompetency 
 for the task she had undertaken. Lady Hill- 
 ingdon complained that Mary was far from a 
 first-rate performer on the harp ; that Agatha 
 was unequal to take part in an amateur per- 
 formance of Kossini's i Barbiere,' got up at 
 Brighton by some dilettante duchess ; and 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 65 
 
 that neither of them displayed the least genius 
 for tableaux or charades. 
 
 But when thus taxed with neglect of their 
 education, Mrs Fairfax was never known to 
 defend herself at the expense of the girls. 
 She complained neither of their incapacity 
 nor the obstacles she had encountered; the 
 chief of which, by the way, was the difficulty 
 of reconciling the lessons of virtue and wis- 
 dom she inculcated, with the example of their 
 own family. 
 
 There was but one member of it, indeed, 
 by whom her system of education was upheld. 
 Mr Corbet, the grandfather of the girls, had 
 become keenly sensitive, in his declining 
 years, to the evils of the very different princi- 
 ples instilled into his own daughters. Deeply 
 wounded by the conduct of Lady Hillingdon, 
 and conscious that he was reaping the whirl- 
 wind where he had sowed the wind, he re- 
 joiced to know that his granddaughters were 
 reared in a different school ; and when grand- 
 
66 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 mamma announced one day at Hindon Manor 
 that " thank God ! the Hillingdons had dis- 
 missed their governess at last," her husband 
 responded in a subdued voice " Poor girls ! 
 they have lost their best friend ! " 
 
 Such, however, was not their brother's 
 view of the case. 
 
 " So, girls ! you have thrown over your 
 dragon, eh ? " said George, stretching him- 
 self luxuriously on the sofa of his sisters' 
 morning-room, the day after his arrival on 
 a visit to Lady Hillingdon, immediately 
 after his rustication at Oxford. 
 
 " Mrs Fairfax left us at Christmas," re- 
 plied Agatha. 
 
 " And high time, too ! I fancy the go- 
 vernor would have cashiered her, years ago, 
 had it been convenient to book up her 
 arrears. Who ever heard of a girl of nine- 
 teen in leading strings ! And you know, 
 Mary, you are nineteen. You can't deceive 
 
 me." 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 67 
 
 " You deceive yourself, brother, I am 
 twenty, a year younger than yourself." 
 
 " True I shall be of age in June. 
 Who knows it better than I, except per- 
 haps the governor, who wants me to help 
 him to square his accounts, by cheating 
 myself of my birthright." 
 
 " And shall you assist my father ? " in- 
 quired Agatha, who, since the departure of 
 Mrs Fairfax, had heard of little else from 
 her mother but her father's embarrassments, 
 and the impending ruin of the family. 
 
 " I shall assist myself. There is no way 
 I fancy of getting my debts paid, but help- 
 ing the old boy to pay off his own. For 
 though mine amount to hundreds where he 
 will have to book up thousands, it would be 
 the deuce of a thing, you know, to crush 
 my own credit my first season in town. 
 So to clear off old scores, and commence 
 new ones, I shall give a lift to Lord Hill- 
 ingdon." 
 
68 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 " Thank heaven ! " ejaculated Mary, who 
 had been grieving bitterly over the intel- 
 ligence of her father's humiliations, taunt- 
 ingly communicated by his wife. 
 
 " But I can tell him, 'twill be the last 
 time," added George. " The Hillingdon rent- 
 roll will be as much reduced as I can 
 afford to let him reduce it. That is the 
 worst, you see, of having a father of 
 forty-two, when one comes to be one-and- 
 twenty. Lord Hillingdon has five-and- 
 twenty years of folly before him ; whereas 
 it would particularly suit my book to 
 monopolize on my own account (now I am 
 come to years of discretion) the extrava- 
 gance of the family." 
 
 " In order that at forty-two your son 
 may call you ' the old boy,' and talk of 
 you as an object of charity ?" remon- 
 strated his sister. 
 
 " No, Miss Mary ! " said George, raising 
 his handsome face from the sofa-cushion 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 69 
 
 on which he was lounging, and turning it 
 with a smile towards his prosy sister ; 
 " I never intend to have a son. I am 
 too poor to marry for love, too proud 
 to marry for money, and too much at- 
 tached to myself to throw myself away. 
 By the way, I must tell you something 
 supereminently capital. Those Clutterbuck 
 people found me out last week, during the 
 two days I spent in town on my way from 
 Hillingdon hither, and insisted on my 
 dining with them. Conceive that stupid 
 woman c Joddrelling' me the other night 
 at the opera, while waiting for her carriage, 
 as if afraid that any one in London should 
 remain ignorant of the relationship between 
 
 us." 
 
 " And why should they ? " quietly inter- 
 posed Agatha. 
 
 " You will understand better, when you 
 have passed a season in town ! I doubt 
 whether my mother will even allow you 
 
70 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 to visit her sister, at least, I shall strongly 
 advise her against it." 
 
 " You have always been acquainted with 
 the family ?" observed Mary, in an in- 
 quiring tone. 
 
 " Oh ! a man may be acquainted with 
 all sorts and conditions of people, without 
 compromising himself, more especially before 
 he comes out. Aunt Sophia used to tip me 
 five guineas at Eton, when she came down 
 every year to Ascot races. Such relations 
 were not to be despised by a schoolboy." 
 
 " Not even after he has come out," 
 said Agatha, coolly, "if he have any 
 sense of gratitude." 
 
 " Do not come Mrs Fairfax over us!" said 
 George, languidly. " I have promised to 
 spend a week at Brighton pray do not 
 render it more disagreeable than necessary. 
 But to return to the Clutterbuck people ! 
 I am convinced my good aunt's civilities 
 tend to nothing less than to secure me 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 71 
 
 for one of her daughters ! In days of yore, 
 schoolboys were easily barley-sugared into 
 falling in love with a pretty cousin, during 
 the holidays. Mais nous avons change 
 tout cela! and the moment I found the 
 good lady insinuate that her dear Caroline 
 and Emma would have a hundred thousand 
 pounds a-piece, and had been reared to 
 become an ornament to the highest society 
 in the land, I made her my best bow, and 
 rattled off my cab from Portland place, as 
 if all my Oxford duns were at my horses' 
 heels." 
 
 "Are my cousins pleasing girls?" de- 
 manded his sister Agatha. 
 
 " That depends upon whom is to be pleased. 
 They would not please you ; they would not 
 please Madam Fairfax; they would not 
 please my mother; and they don't please 
 me! But they are beautiful, highly accom- 
 plished, and amazingly admired in their own 
 set." 
 
72 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 " And what fault have you to find with 
 them?" 
 
 " That they are under-bred, and do too 
 much of everything." 
 
 " My dear brother ! what can you pos- 
 sibly mean?" exclaimed the simple-hearted 
 Agatha. 
 
 " That they dress in the extreme of the 
 fashion ; are overloaded with ornaments, 
 enthusiastically musical, passionately fond of 
 dancing, careful to be seen on showy horses 
 or in a showy carriage in the park, and in a 
 glaring double box at the opera! In Lon- 
 don, that species of publicity is fatal in a 
 case like theirs, with a name and in a posi- 
 tion of which the less said the better. They 
 ought to have kept as quiet as dormice." 
 
 "Is there anything against the family, 
 then?" demanded Agatha, with a look of 
 consternation. 
 
 " Everything ! Joseph Clutterbuck is a 
 city-man. What he was, I trust he knows ; 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 73 
 
 for he will then prove himself to be a wiser 
 man than any one else. Don't look so inno- 
 cently alarmed, child. I mean only that he 
 is a man without connexions, or hereditary 
 distinction of any sort or kind." 
 
 " How did you leave my father, and how 
 is dear Hillingdon looking ? " inquired Mary, 
 beginning to see through the empty flippancy 
 of her brother's strictures. 
 
 " Dear Hillingdon was looking naked, cold, 
 and dull, as usual; and Lord Hillingdon 
 nearly as dull as his house ! Hunting is over, 
 and at the close of the season, the governor 
 feels that, for the next six months, his occupa- 
 tion's gone. Now he is obliged to give up 
 Newmarket, and that his I. 0. U.'s are not 
 worth their weight as waste paper, he has 
 grown sick of London. But I can't fancy 
 he would find a spring spent at Hillingdon 
 much more amusing. Such a barrack as the 
 place looks ! Since the execution, seven years 
 ago, there have been only half-a-dozen rooms 
 
 VOL. I. E 
 
74 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 re-furnished, just enough to entertain a few 
 fox-hunting squires, who are content to take 
 bachelor's fare, plain roast and boiled, venison 
 and claret. You've no notion what a wretched 
 table he keeps ! Martyn, the old housekeeper, 
 goes moping about the place like the tame 
 raven in the garden, too much accustomed 
 to it to live elsewhere, though sick at heart 
 of everything passing around her." 
 
 " Poor Mrs Martyn ! how good she used 
 to be to us when we were children," sighed 
 Agatha. 
 
 " Even now, I'm persuaded the old goose is 
 twenty times fonder of us than my father or 
 mother," said George. " She would insist upon 
 showing me the family pictures in the gal- 
 lery (which are heir-loom), and all but fell 
 on her knees to implore me never to sanction 
 their being sold off." 
 
 " Poor dear old Martyn ! " sighed the girls. 
 
 u She was even silly enough to tell me my 
 lord was welcome to her own savings, sooner 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 75 
 
 than part with the precious pictures she 
 has been exhibiting with so much pride to 
 visitors, for the last forty years! Martyn 
 was housekeeper, you know, to my grand- 
 father." 
 
 "But are the pictures likely to be sold?" 
 inquired Agatha Joddrell, with a grave 
 face. 
 
 " Why not ? They produce nothing. Much 
 better part with them than with the Wiltshire 
 estates, which bring in two thousand a year ! 
 Besides, Hillingdon is good for nothing, but a 
 hunting seat, in its present dilapidated state ; 
 and who in the world would lock up Guidos 
 and Raphaels in a hunting seat? If my 
 opinion goes for anything with my father, he 
 will bring every canvas of them to the ham- 
 mer ! I intend to make two provisos before 
 I sign away the entail. He must break up 
 the Hillingdon gallery, and take a good 
 house in town for the season." 
 
 " I should be sorry to see papa do either," 
 
 E2 
 
76 PEERS ANlf PARVENUS. 
 
 said Mary. "The pictures were collected 
 by my grandfather, at a cost that will never 
 be repaid." 
 
 " And which commenced the embarrass- 
 ment of the family affairs ! " added her bro- 
 ther." 
 
 " And as to a house in town," continued 
 Mary, accustomed to hear her maiden aunts 
 enlarge upon the indispensability of such an 
 appendage to the family possessions, that her 
 nieces might be properly presented, " I assure 
 you neither Agatha nor myself are ambitious 
 of appearing in the world." 
 
 " What has that to do with it, pray?" de- 
 manded the affectionate brother. " Is the 
 governor in the habit of consulting you, Mary, 
 on such points?" 
 
 " He has not spoken six words to me 
 for the last two years ! " said Mary with a 
 sigh. 
 
 " Nor to any one else, except his head 
 groom and the groom porter!" answered 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 77 
 
 George. " I dare say it would suit him to keep 
 on his pied-a-terre in St James's place, and 
 let you and my mother vegetate here. But 
 it won't do for me ! A fellow of moderate 
 means launches better in London when his 
 family is well-established there ; and I shall 
 make it a sine qua non of helping the lame 
 dog over the stile, that his lordship lends a 
 hand, in return, to the lame puppy. 
 
 " Pray do not speak in that way of papa ! " 
 cried Agatha, growing impatient of his imper- 
 tinence; " it is a thing we are not accustomed 
 to hear." 
 
 " Then why favour me with a sermon, 
 which is a thing I am not accustomed to 
 hear?" replied her brother. " So now, good 
 bye ! I must go and have my morning squab- 
 ble with my mother ! " 
 
 " I believe mamma is engaged with her 
 friend Lady Ursula Wainwright," said 
 Agatha. 
 
 " Her friend ! " retorted George ; adding, 
 
78 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 in a muttered voice, as lie quitted the room, 
 " Commend me to the strange liaisons and 
 crooked sentiments which pass current in 
 this wicked world, under the name of 
 friendship ! " 
 
PEERS AND PARYENUS. 79 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Fools are often united in the strictest intimacies; as the 
 lighter kinds of wood are the most closely glued together. 
 
 SHENSTONB. 
 
 GEORGE JODDRELL had some excuse for mar- 
 velling at the term friendship, as applied to 
 the intimacy subsisting between Lady Hilling- 
 don and Lady Ursula Wainwright. 
 
 Sir Charles Wainwright, when a Captain 
 in the Guards, was the man whose attentions 
 to the pretty Emma had first provoked the 
 animadversions of society. At that period, 
 Lady Ursula and herself were constantly to- 
 gether; connected by the same frivolous pur- 
 suits, the same vacuity of mind. They shared 
 an opera-box, drove together, rode together, 
 lounged at the same milliner's, and ran in 
 
80 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 debt to the same jeweller ; at the end of the 
 summer, repaired together to Cowes for 
 yachting; and at the end of the autumn, to 
 Brighton, to yawn away the winter in each 
 other's company. 
 
 As usual, inseparability between two hand- 
 some women was precursive of a sudden out- 
 break of hostilities. They quarrelled. Some 
 said Lady Ursula was jealous of her husband, 
 some of her lover, some of a new archery 
 dress surreptitiously got up by her rival. 
 Certain it is, that a paper war was followed 
 by a sullen amnesty; nor was it till after an 
 accidental encounter at a Dover regatta, ten 
 years afterwards (when, if not wiser, both 
 were colder than of yore), that a permanent 
 peace was signed and sealed between the belli- 
 gerents. The mutual confidences which at 
 four-and-twenty bound them together, and 
 afterwards disunited them, had all been 
 couleur de rose. But at four-and-thirty, with 
 children growing up, and fortunes and fame 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 81 
 
 diminished, life was assuming a jnore sombre 
 hue. Each was in need of a sympathizing 
 companion on whom to bestow her grum- 
 blings; and mutual pity was less likely than 
 envious rivalship to beget commotions in the 
 state. 
 
 From that moment, accordingly, Lady 
 Ursula and Lady Hillingdon became sworn 
 companions. Each maintained to the world 
 that the husband of the other was the greatest 
 brute in creation, and his wife the most to be 
 pitied of her sex; and the world pronounced 
 in return Lady Ursula and Lady Hillingdon 
 to be exemplary in the stanchness of their 
 friendship. 
 
 The progress of time, in short, while it 
 rendered these two useless individuals less 
 important to society, rendered them doubly 
 important to each other. They mutually un- 
 derstood each other's aches and pains, and ap- 
 preciated each other's grievances. No one but 
 Lady Ursula Wainwright would have affected 
 
 E3 
 
82 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 to believe, while looking through Lady Hil- 
 lingdon's rouge at her prematurely wrinkled 
 face, that she rarely slept by night and never 
 rested by day; no one but Lady Hillingdon 
 would have made even a pretence at credulity 
 when Lady Ursula, between the rare pauses 
 of her unmeaning merriment, declared that 
 peace was a stranger to her bosom. But thus 
 essential to each other as listeners and sym- 
 pathizers, they continued to meet daily 
 while inhabiting the same city, and to cor- 
 respond weekly when doomed to separation, 
 saying alternately the sweetest and tartest 
 things to each other. Engrossed by the 
 exactions of this grand tie upon her time, 
 Lady Hillingdon overlooked the fact that 
 her daughters were growing into young 
 women while she had subsided into an old one. 
 " So Lord Hillingdon has actually en- 
 gaged a house in Hill street for you?" 
 cried the confidante, shortly after George's 
 departure from Brighton. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 83 
 
 " How did you hear of it?" 
 
 " There is a paragraph on the subject in 
 the ' Morning Post/ promising ftes and 
 hospitalities." 
 
 " And, for once, telling truth ! " observed 
 Lady Hillingdon, with an air of unusual 
 importance. " I had a letter yesterday from 
 Hillingdon, who wishes us to be in town 
 by the 24th." 
 
 " And you are really going to give din- 
 ners and ftes? Now, my dear Emma!" 
 remonstrated the bosom friend, "you know 
 there can be no motive for deceiving me! " 
 
 " None on earth George has joined with 
 his father in raising the supplies. My son 
 has promised to set us free from all our 
 difficulties on coming of age; and chooses us 
 to pass the season in town." 
 
 " Why what good can your being in town 
 possibly do to Mr Joddrell ? " exclaimed Lady 
 Ursula. "You have not been there (ex- 
 cept a few days now and then at an hotel) 
 
84 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 these eight years past; and your connexion 
 is totally broken up. It would require a 
 far more brilliant entertainment, my dear, 
 than you are likely to give, to startle the 
 world into recollection." 
 
 "It is impossible to guess what line my 
 son intends to take," observed Lady Hilling- 
 don, somewhat piqued at the freedoms of her 
 friend. " George is to regulate our proceed- 
 ings; and no one better understands the 
 way in which things ought to be done." 
 
 " The way of paying for them is chiefly 
 the question." 
 
 " I told you before, that Joddrell had 
 joined Lord Hillingdon in raising money." 
 
 " Ah ! if it is just to be a dash, for a 
 single season " 
 
 " I'm sure I don't know what it is to be, 
 except a thorough break-up of my com- 
 fort!" sighed the indolent Lady Hillingdon, 
 taking refuge, as was her wont, in affecta- 
 tion, when she found herself on the point 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 85 
 
 of being brought to reason. " I am now 
 so little used to exertion so accustomed to 
 a quiet home, and having my little com- 
 forts about me," (and she glanced as she 
 spoke from Chloe's bamboo kennel to her 
 rosewood medicine chest,) "that I detest 
 the thoughts of giving myself up anew to 
 the heartlessness of the world." 
 
 Lady Ursula prudently forbore to smile. 
 
 " Besides, what am I to do in town with 
 those girls ? " 
 
 " Bring them out, of course, which is, 
 I suppose, the object of Mr Joddrell's press- 
 ing you to pass the season there." 
 
 " I fancy his solicitudes are chiefly for 
 himself. He knows very little of his sisters." 
 
 " He knows, at least, that Agatha, at 
 one-and-twenty, ought to be presented." 
 
 " One-and-twenty ! no my dear love ! 
 Against that sort of ill-nature we are trebly 
 guarded. Miss Joddrell's age is easily ascer- 
 tained by the peerage." 
 
86 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 " Considering that you have taken care 
 to send their names without dates " 
 
 "At all events, every one knows that 
 George is the eldest of the family, and 
 that had he been of age we should not 
 have been vegetating all this time at 
 Brighton ! " interrupted Lady Hillingdon, 
 vexed out of her pretended indifference. 
 
 " You always declared you were so fond 
 of Brighton !" interposed the provoking 
 bosom-friend. 
 
 " And so I am, in moderation ; but one 
 may have too much of even the best of 
 things. Only conceive, my dear Ursula, 
 what it will be to wear myself out as 
 a chaperon, night after night, for the 
 next three months; a fixture on a sofa, 
 near a steaming wall, with wax dropping 
 on my shoulders, between two old dow- 
 agers in tinsel turbans, with miroite velvet 
 gowns ! " 
 
 " I dare say you will find means of amu- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 87 
 
 sing yourself. Lord Charles will be in town, 
 you know." 
 
 "But when did he ever show in a ball- 
 room ? He likes to spend a sociable even- 
 ing where he dines; and never goes to 
 parties. The very thing he used to like 
 in our house, was being sure of his quiet 
 whist, without music, noise, or young 
 people. He will shun me like the plague, 
 when involved in the vulgar vortex of a 
 chaperoning mamma." 
 
 " At least, you have consulted his taste 
 by postponing your duties till the last de- 
 cent moment," retorted Lady Ursula; " and 
 if you dash away at the rate you intend, 
 a single season may perhaps get rid of the 
 girls." 
 
 " You say that to vex me ! You know 
 I have not the least chance of such a 
 blessing ! Neither of them has the slightest 
 air of fashion, the least particle of dis- 
 tinction It is all that horrid Mrs Fairfax. 
 
88 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 When I wrote to mamma to get me a 
 French governess, fifteen years ago, I never 
 could make out why she sent that stupid 
 precise piece of goods to Hillingdon Hall. 
 And yet, between one difficulty and another, 
 I could never afterwards get rid of her." 
 
 " Admit that she took a wonderful deal 
 of trouble off your hands, and never bored 
 you with so much as a glimpse of the 
 girls." 
 
 " Very true ; but then the unfinished 
 state in which she left their education ! 
 They will never make the figure they 
 ought ; and I shall probably have them left 
 on my hands, just as poor dear mamma 
 has got Harriet and Charlotte." 
 
 " For your sake, then, my dear, I re- 
 joice that they are somewhat more tract- 
 able than your sisters. It is scarcely 
 likely there should be two other women 
 in the world so cross-grained and snappish 
 as the Miss Corbets ; but certainly Mary 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 89 
 
 and Agatha are good inoffensive girls, as 
 times ago." 
 
 " We must try what can be done with 
 them ! " said the lady mother, shrugging her 
 shoulders, as in despair. " I have given 
 Lord Hillingdon and George plainly to un- 
 derstand that I will not undertake the thing, 
 unless they afford me the means of intro- 
 ducing my daughters in a manner becom- 
 ing the station of the family. I will have 
 no bailiffs in the house, as there used to 
 be, whenever we had a party staying at 
 Hillingdon. I will have no job-horses, no 
 occasional boxes at the opera. It is of the 
 greatest importance to George, that every- 
 thing about us should be in the best style." 
 
 " And to the girls, pray ? " 
 
 " The girls care about nothing of the kind. 
 I quite tremble at the prospect of having 
 to rub off their mauvaise honte, and get 
 them on." 
 
 " Pretty girls get on of themselves." 
 
90 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 " Not without fortune or fashion." 
 
 " In a certain set, perhaps not ; but is 
 that set the safest for you ? Might you 
 not marry your daughters better by starring 
 it in a less pretending circle ? Your sister, 
 Mrs Clutterbuck, might introduce you into 
 her wealthy Portland-place line of connexion." 
 
 "Thank you!" cried Lady Hillingdon, 
 completely out of patience. " I should like 
 to hear you make the same proposition to 
 George ! No ! my dear Lady Ursula, 
 surprising as it may seem to you, I am 
 likely to live in a style becoming the wife 
 of Lord Hillingdon. I am only sorry that 
 we are to lose your society. It would have 
 given me such delight to invite you to 
 pass the season with us. But unluckily, 
 George, (by way of securing himself against 
 the intrusion of his aunts,) has made it 
 an express condition that we are to have 
 no inmates in Hill street." 
 
 " Mr Joddrell is quite right ! Your sisters 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 91 
 
 would have been a sad tax on his comfort. 
 With respect to myself, had you not made 
 arrangements for a house in town, I intended 
 to offer you a pied a terre in mine. Sir 
 Charles has bought a little bijou of a thing 
 at Grosvenor gate. We are to be there 
 next week." 
 
 " Settle in town ? after all Wainwright's 
 protestations ? " 
 
 " What man's consistency is to be relied 
 upon ! The creatures have enough to do to 
 keep their word to their constituents." 
 
 " But Wainwright used to detest London ! " 
 
 " To detest parties ! But since the es- 
 tablishment of these myriads of clubs, the 
 face of society has completely changed. A 
 man may amuse himself without setting his 
 foot in society. Besides, my dear, at our 
 time of life, people want to settle ; and 
 after all, poor dear Brighton is but a water- 
 ing-place." 
 
92 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 Such were the domestic projects with 
 which Sir Charles and Lady Ursula Wain- 
 wright and Lord and Lady Hillingdon took 
 possession of their new houses in town! 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 93 
 
 CHAPTER VIL 
 
 Drudges, who take from our reluctant hands 
 What Burn advises, and the Bench commands. 
 
 CRABBE. 
 
 We wisely strip the steed we mean to buy; 
 
 Why judge in their caparisons of men ? 
 
 All the distinctions of this little life 
 
 Are quite cutaneous ! YOUNG. 
 
 NEARLY two years after Jervis Cleve's inau- 
 guration at Fairford, the Hecks worths came 
 to spend a week or two with Sir William 
 Davenport, at the Grange. 
 
 The squire's lady had more than once 
 condescended to inquire, in the interim, of 
 aunt Morris, (who, now a martyr to the 
 rheumatism, hobbled to the garden-gate when 
 madam went by, to tend her a double poly- 
 anthus or a bunch of carnations, according to 
 
94 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 the season,) concerning the progress of poor 
 Jervis. But though the answers received of 
 " Pure well, madam, the Lord be thanked !" 
 or " most a man grown and a fine scholar 
 now, thanks to your ladyship's goodness and 
 the blessing of heaven," satisfied her that 
 all was right, it conveyed no definite impres- 
 sion of the progress of the object of her 
 benevolence. 
 
 One day, however, when driving in Sir 
 William's phaeton through the grimy town of 
 Fairford, having inquired the nature of a curi- 
 ous old red brick pile, nearly as quaint and 
 mean-looking as St James's Palace, which she 
 had noticed every time she visited the place, 
 but never before with sufficient interest to 
 prompt an inquiry, she was told that it was 
 the " College," a free-school of high renown 
 and ancient foundation. And lo ! her Bilston 
 protege* recurred to her recollection. 
 
 " Why that is surely the school to which 
 you gave little Cleve a presentation for me?" 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 95 
 
 she demanded ; " the sick child, you know, 
 whom we thought not strong enough for a life 
 of hard labour ? " 
 
 " Exactly ! I have never thought to in- 
 quire about him since. I wonder how he 
 has turned out ? Had he done anything 
 amiss, however, the board would have let 
 me know." 
 
 " Supposing we inquire, as we are passing 
 the place. I should like to have a nearer 
 view of those old cloisters and the yew-trees." 
 
 " Better put it off tiU another day ! The 
 Eavenswells dine with us. 'Tis near five 
 o'clock. We shan't get home till six, then 
 we have to dress. and Ravenswell is such a 
 punctilious fellow ! " 
 
 " Nearly five ? only four, I assure you ! " 
 said Mrs Hecksworth, peeping into a Breguet 
 watch, which she extracted from the bosom 
 of her satin pelisse. 
 
 " I hope you don't expect me to be guided 
 by a watch the size of a butter-cup ?" said 
 
96 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 the bluff baronet. " I'd as soon trust the 
 cuckoo-clock in the first old woman's cottage 
 we pass on the road ! " 
 
 "Trust your own eyes, then !" said his 
 sister, pointing to a venerable dial inserted 
 above the gateway of the principal entrance 
 to Fairford College ; and lo ! the hands 
 pointed distinctly to four. Sir William sat 
 convicted. There was no denying the fact, 
 there was no evading the consequences. 
 
 Bringing up his phaeton knowingly there- 
 fore before the rusty gateway of the old court, 
 whose pavement, cracked, worn, and uneven, 
 afforded scope for a tolerable crop of grass, 
 with an occasional patch of groundsel and 
 chickweed, the outriders advanced to possess 
 themselves of the reins, and Sir William 
 alighted and crossed the court with Mrs 
 Hecksworth on his arm. 
 
 But, as might have been inferred from the 
 pastoral aspect of the court, the principal 
 entrance, which the aristocratic visitors had 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 97 
 
 arrogated to themselves, proved to be con- 
 demned and closed up ; and it was only by 
 a side wicket they eventually made their way 
 into the dingy cloister, towards a chocolate 
 coloured door, painted in large white letters 
 with the name of " Mr Peter Parmenter, 
 Master." 
 
 The aspect of the spot was cheerless 
 enough. A peculiar air and atmosphere, 
 by the way, seems to environ our ancient 
 schools of learning, from the dingy quad- 
 rangles of Cam and Isis, to the humble foun- 
 dation-schools of many a county town; a 
 savour of musty leather and sapient periwig, 
 of which the Bodleian may be cited as emit- 
 ting the concentrated essence. 
 
 A preternatural and echoing silence, how- 
 ever, pervaded the place, calculated to subdue 
 the mind to a mood of abstraction highly 
 favourable to philosophical reverie; and Mrs 
 Hecksworth felt satisfied, as she paced the 
 
 VOL. I. F 
 
98 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 glum, fusty, cloister of Fairford College, into 
 which it was difficult to peep from the school - 
 house through its narrow, diamond-paned 
 Gothic windows, that it must be Jervis Cleve's 
 own fault if he had not studied himself into 
 a world of wisdom in so secluded and dispirit- 
 ing a retreat; for it was the very spot 
 to convert monks into saints, and dunces 
 into philosophers! 
 
 The lady of the Hall, meanwhile, had 
 almost forgotten Jervis. Her patronage of 
 the sickly child had been a freak of bene- 
 volence, the impulse of a restless nature, 
 rather than the suggestion of a far-thoughted 
 charity. The most she expected to learn of 
 him was, that he had turned out a good boy ; 
 versed in testament and catechism, with per- 
 haps a sufficient sprinkling of classical learn- 
 ing to entitle him, at some future time, to 
 become usher to a hedge school. 
 
 But on lifting the latch, so awful in the 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 99 
 
 eyes of the Fairford collegians, of the re- 
 nowned Mr Peter Parmenter, she was to be 
 impressed with other notions. 
 
 P. P. (the hour of four being ex-collegiate,) 
 was sitting at an ancient bureau covered with 
 ragged rusty black leather, and surmounted 
 by a rusty black tea-board, sipping small tea 
 also purporting to be black, and dipping into 
 it sippets of bread and butter, purporting to 
 be brown. Brown too was his all but hair- 
 bare caxon, brown his coat ; brown even 
 his puckered visage, and the lean lank hands 
 which, for forty years past, had wielded the 
 ferule of Fairfordian authority. 
 
 On the entrance of strangers, Peter rose 
 perpendicularly from his horsehair chair, till 
 he stood six feet two in his shoes and buckles ; 
 impressed with all the awe compatible with 
 his inches and learning, on finding himself in 
 presence of so grand a lady. But when he 
 ascertained that the gentleman by whom she 
 was accompanied was not only a Sir William, 
 
 F2 
 
100 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 but an hereditary Governor of Fairford Col- 
 lege, his awe increased almost to trepidation. 
 
 Though both his visitors had complied with 
 his request that they would be seated, he still 
 kept urging them to take a chair ; nor was it 
 till five minutes wore away in preliminary 
 explanations, that he could be brought clearly 
 to^ apprehend the object of their visit, or ra- 
 tionally to reply to their inquiries. 
 
 Once fairly apprized, however, the peda- 
 gogue's vein of communication flowed freely; 
 for the Jervis of whom they spake was his 
 favourite, his hobby, his prize tulip. He 
 could never say enough of Jervis Cleve ! The 
 chart framed and appended to the wall behind 
 his high-backed chair, and by its cleanly blue- 
 white surface affording so strange a contrast 
 to the smoke-dyed wall, was the work of 
 Jervis. A half-bound marble papered volume 
 of MS. which he produced from a neighbour- 
 ing desk, contained the collected themes of 
 Jervis. Jervis was already the wonder of 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. JQ1 , 
 
 Fairford; nor did Peter Parmenter enter-' 
 tain a doubt that he would eventually become 
 the wonder of the world. 
 
 " Upon my life, Maria," cried Sir William, 
 addressing his sister as he turned over the 
 leaves, " this boy will prove a credit to us. 
 He writes a capital hand. Who knows? 
 some day or other, Hecksworth may find him 
 useful as a steward." 
 
 " Steward? " echoed Peter Parmenter, in a 
 tone as scornful as he dared address, even 
 in a side-wind, to an hereditary Governor of 
 Fairford College. "Steward? The youth 
 is the first Grecian of the sixth form ! " 
 
 " Don't you think," observed Mrs Hecks- 
 worth, addressing her brother, after a careful 
 examination through her eyeglass of the chart 
 of Arctic Discoveries adorning the wall, " that 
 you might, at some future period, get him 
 made parish surveyor ? " 
 
 " Parish surveyor!" reiterated Peter Par- 
 menter, with a frown as reprehensive as he 
 
102 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 dared inflict upon the sister of a baronet. 
 " The youth is the first mathematician in the 
 county ! " 
 
 " You find him, I hope, a well-disposed 
 lad?" demanded Sir William Davenport, in 
 the lofty tone of a patron. 
 
 " Exemplary in morals as in his scholastic 
 duties!" replied the pedagogue. 
 
 " And tractable and amiable?" added Mrs 
 Hecksworth. 
 
 "Mild 
 
 As zephyr blowing on the violet, 
 Not wagging its sweet head! " 
 
 quoted the rhetorician. 
 
 " I should like to say a word to him before 
 I go," said Sir William; and Peter Parmenter, 
 fancying that the worthy baronet (all baronets 
 being worthy in print,) was feeling in his 
 pocket for his purse, intent upon a tip, 
 shuffled off in search of his juvenile Crichton. 
 
 While he was gone, Mrs Hecksworth had 
 leisure to summon before her mind's eye the 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 103 
 
 improved edition of Jervis Cleve, which the 
 munificence of her brother might be said to 
 have called into existence. Fancy portrayed 
 the inspired boy as pale, thin, intellectual- 
 looking; his large dark eyes animated by the 
 fire within his frame gently bowed under the 
 pressure of uneradicable disease. Sir William 
 Davenport busied himself on the other hand 
 in examining the worm-eaten furniture of the 
 magisterial chamber; the defaced flogging 
 block ; the college inauguration chapter-book 
 chained by a brass chain to a small walnut- 
 wood reading desk. 
 
 For some minutes, Mrs Hecksworth kept 
 her eyes fixed upon the door through which 
 this second Blaise Pascal, this new Jean Jacques 
 Rousseau, was to make his appearance; and 
 the door being at length flung widely open on 
 its creaking hinges by the long arm of Peter 
 Parmenter, there appeared, in a long-tailed 
 blue coat, with leather shorts, grey worsted 
 stockings, and on his head a dark blue woollen 
 
104 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 crumpet, having a bordering of red ferret, a 
 lanky, sallow, long-haired, long-eared, lad of 
 sixteen; his knees knocking with terror, and 
 his ears ringing with nervousness. 
 
 The lady's disenchantment was instantane- 
 ous ! Had she been conscious of beholding as 
 great a scholar as Parr or Person, her disgust 
 would have been equally invincible. Nothing 
 but an overgrown charity boy was at present 
 discernible in Jervis Cleve. 
 
 Nor was Peter Parmenter's mode of recom- 
 mending him to her notice likely to do away 
 with her unfavourable impression. On re- 
 covering from the reverie into which she had 
 fallen at the unsightly apparition, Mrs Hecks- 
 worth found poor Jervis stammering through 
 an harangue which she should have pronounced 
 gibberish, had not the pedagogue condescend- 
 ingly informed her that it was a favourite 
 passage from Thucydides, which he had re- 
 quired his admirable Crichton to recite for 
 her entertainment. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 105 
 
 Though almost as cruelly disenchanted as 
 when she found dirty noses and shock heads, 
 where she had looked for blue eyes and flaxen 
 ringlets, among her innocents of the catechiz- 
 ing class, she humanely resolved that her 
 uncouth protege should not pay the penalty of 
 her unreasonable expectations. Bestowing upon 
 him a golden guinea, to which Sir William 
 Davenport good-naturedly added a second, she 
 promised to send him, on her return home, a 
 present of books adapted to his improved 
 capacities ; and had made her parting saluta- 
 tion to his admiring pedagogue, and was 
 even across the weedy court of honour, the 
 rusty gates of which were opened by Peter 
 Parmenter in person on the lady's especial 
 account, before poor Jervis had sufficiently 
 subdued the agitation of his frame, clearly to 
 see, hear, or understand what was passing 
 around him. 
 
 To the credit of Mrs Hecksworth, be it 
 admitted, she was as good as her word. 
 
106 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 She did not suffer her precipitation from 
 her stilts to injure the innocent cause of 
 her fall. On arriving at Bilston Hall, she 
 dispatched an order, and a five-pound note, 
 to a London school-library, eminent for the 
 cheapness of its classics and durability of its 
 calf, and enabled occasionally to lose money 
 by the publication of a flashy quarto of travels, 
 got up with plates of green and purple land- 
 scapes, or a duodecimo of aristocratic poems 
 empty even of plates, by the vast diffu- 
 sion of juvenile knowledge promoted by its 
 shelves. 
 
 The selection of this experienced bibliopole 
 was bespoken, by Mrs Hecksworth's letter, for 
 a rising scholar of sixteen ; but as there hap- 
 pened to be a surplus just then in the mathe- 
 matical department of his stock in trade, the 
 classics were dispensed with in executing the 
 lady's order, as works of supererogation in an 
 atmosphere of practical learning such as Fair- 
 ford College; and, by this trivial chance, the 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 youth of parts was destined to become 
 of figures ! 
 
 To such incidents are often attributable the 
 powerful influences which control a human 
 destiny ! A molehill was instrumental in anni- 
 hilating an anointed sovereign of the realm ; 
 and the redundance of Messieurs Omnitypes' 
 Bonny castles was destined to sway the future 
 fortunes of Jervis Cleve ! Both the pedagogue 
 and himself regarded the peculiar selection of 
 the books bestowed upon Sir William Daven- 
 port's protege*, as indicative of the career to 
 which he was destined; and from that day, 
 Peter Parmenter's efforts were directed, as far 
 as was compatible with college routine, to 
 create a second Newton in his favourite. 
 
 Had Mrs Hecks worth suggested the study 
 of Sanscrit or the acquirement of Anglo- 
 Saxon, or any other dry or unavailable 
 pursuit, the lad would have been equally 
 submissive. But, fortunately, the choice of 
 his benefactress squared with his own in- 
 clinations ; and when, two years afterwards, 
 
108 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 young Cleve, endowed with his exhibition, 
 and all the appliances and means of main- 
 tenance to which the foundation of the 
 college could promote so promising a dis- 
 ciple, proceeded to Cambridge, his fame 
 soon circulated through the university as 
 the first mathematician of his day. Within 
 six months, Jervis acquired among the heads 
 of colleges, and other elders and dignitaries 
 of the seat of learning, the specific title 
 of The Fairford Youth. 
 
 But while his reputation was gathering 
 strength, and his renown echoing through the 
 quiet quadrangle^ of Alma Mater, at humble 
 Bilston this proficiency was far less noted. 
 The Cleve family was vaguely aware that 
 poor little Jervy was grown a wonder of 
 book-learning. But while they saw him return 
 home twice every year, from Fairford, ar- 
 rayed in the same badge of nothingness 
 the long-tailed coat and leather shorts, 
 the grey stockings and blue crumpet with 
 ferret bindinsr, aunt Morris and his father 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 109 
 
 could not bring themselves to believe that 
 the boy was advancing in the world. The 
 two elder girls, Mary and Kitty, had each 
 in her turn visited Bilston, arrayed in as 
 much patent lace and pink ribbon as the 
 bargain-shops of Soho could furnish in ex- 
 change for their earnings ; and Jem, who 
 was now a man in office, as second waiter 
 at the Crown Inn, Birmingham, had strutted 
 home in a second-hand bottle-green coat, 
 with a scarlet waistcoat and white corduroys. 
 But Jervis, with all his vaunted scholarship, 
 seemed to have achieved little more than 
 his stupid brother Jack, who, being still a 
 cowboy, plodded in a smock-frock. 
 
 Even the half-dozen guineas which, in 
 the course of his four years at Fairford, 
 were at sundry visits' bestowed upon him 
 by his patrons, and forthwith transmitted to 
 the cottage, pleaded little in his favour as 
 indications of future greatness ; for he 
 would have earned twice as much by weed- 
 
110 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 ing madam's garden, at his original salary 
 of one shilling a week ! 
 
 It was not till, at the close of his first 
 academic year, the Fairford youth made his 
 appearance in an uncustomary suit of solemn 
 black, his trencher-cap of woollen exchanged 
 for a hat of beaver, and his highlows for 
 Wellington boots, (vastly like the hero of a 
 frontispiece illustrating the fable of " The 
 Poet and the Kose" in Mr Omnitype's edi- 
 tion of Gay,) that aunt Morris expressed 
 her opinion that " the dear boy was now 
 something like;" while old Cleve avowed a 
 hope that " som'hat might maybe come on 
 him a'ter all." 
 
 The hopes of his sister Jane, the hand- 
 in-hand companion of his childhood, if 
 equally vague, were still more sanguine. 
 For Jane, though as incapable as her father 
 and aunt of appreciating the extent of her 
 brother's victories or the nature of his' 
 prospects, relied upon the instinctive as- 
 
PEERS AND PABVENUS. Ill 
 
 surances of her heart that Jervis would live 
 to be a great man. 
 
 During the week he spent with his family, 
 the vacation after taking his first degree, 
 she listened indeed with patient admiration, 
 while the grave scholar attempted to ex- 
 pound the mysteries of college preferment. 
 But it was all in vain ! Jenny's notions of 
 academic honours were limited to a belief 
 that scholars might, if they liked, become 
 parsons ; and that parsons, if virtuous and 
 clerkly, were provided by the law of the land 
 with tithes and a parsonage. Nay, the wings 
 of her ambition had now so far sprouted, 
 that she had very little doubt of her 
 learned brother's succession to the curacy 
 of Bilston, with its fifty pounds per annum, 
 and the tenancy of the little vicarage, if 
 Madame Hecksworth would only interest 
 herself to procure it for him, at the death 
 of the incumbent. 
 
 She enlarged accordingly to Jervis upon 
 
112 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 the beauty of its glebe, which afforded 
 pasturage for a cow and donkey ; and 
 the superior merits of a Catherine pear- 
 tree, trained to cover the gable end of 
 the house. But Jervis seemed insensible 
 to all. Neither the pear-tree nor the cow- 
 feed inspired him with the slightest am- 
 bition for a curacy ; and even had he been 
 clerically inclined, the situation of his bene- 
 factress was such as to preclude all possi- 
 bility of intruding upon her for the fur- 
 therance of his worldly interests. The 
 family vault in Bilston church had been 
 recently opened ; and Mrs Hecksworth was 
 weeping away her widowhood in strict se- 
 clusion at the Hall, with the three lovely 
 girls now co-heiresses to the estate. 
 
 It afforded, in fact, no small mortifica- 
 tion to Jervis Cleve, to discern the im- 
 possibility of enlarging the views of his 
 family to the scope of his own. He did 
 not experience the slightest humiliation in 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 113 
 
 returning to his father's cottage, from its 
 wicker chair and spinning-wheel, its meal- 
 tub and salt-box, or the blackbird's- 
 cage that darkened the casement window. 
 The perfect simplicity of heart of aunt 
 Morris the blameless life and uprightness 
 of purpose of the old labourer, who had 
 passed his contracted life in toil and pri- 
 vation, as if conscious of fulfilling the 
 purpose of his being, dignified them in the 
 eyes of the high-minded young man ; while 
 his pretty Jane, gay as a bird, and bright 
 as a flower, delighted him with her girlish 
 beauty and sisterly tenderness. 
 
 But it was vexatious to discover the total 
 want of sympathy in his fortunes, necessi- 
 tated by their ignorance of the world. They 
 knew him to be book-learned; but they would 
 never be able to appreciate the sphere to 
 which his knowledge extended. At Cam- 
 bridge his name commanded universal re- 
 spect. At Cambridge, the wisest and great- 
 
114 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 est could not conjecture the limits to which 
 his wisdom and greatness might attain. At 
 Cambridge, they could pre-figure the Fair- 
 ford youth as a professor of the university, 
 or even as a bishop on the bench. But at 
 Bilston, he was only Jervis Cleve ; a lad who 
 had been spoiled for weeding gardens by 
 the acquirement of heathen languages and 
 useless knowledge! 
 
 Even when, on his second visit to the 
 village, after the monopoly of university 
 honours and prizes, and having sat at meat 
 with the principal of his college, he was 
 summoned to attend at the Hall, it inflicted 
 a pang upon the pride of one who was 
 esteemed a gentleman everywhere but at 
 Bilston, that Mrs Hecksworth should bestow 
 upon him, through the hands of her eldest 
 girl, a pocket-book containing a ten-pound 
 note. That she should receive him stand- 
 ing, and offer him no seat, did not strike 
 him even with surprise; for in the presence 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 115 
 
 of his benefactress, he still felt as in that of 
 a superior being. But the money was a 
 grievance ; and the deep blush with which 
 Lucy Hecksworth stepped awkwardly across 
 the room to drop the note -case into his 
 hand, depressed his spirit with the con- 
 sciousness that the whole family had united 
 in the act of charity. 
 
 Still, to refuse was as impossible as to 
 accept with becoming gratitude; and all he 
 could do for the assuagement of his wounded 
 spirit was to enjoy the gratification with 
 which his old father accepted the same offer- 
 ing from his hands, to be devoted to the 
 purchase of a few household comforts. 
 
 Aunt Morris, indeed, hailed this first 
 realization of her nephew's golden prospects 
 with a degree of exultation that a thousand- 
 fold increased his vexation. It was a death- 
 blow to the ambition of the poor young 
 man, to find at how low a rate his position 
 had been hitherto appreciated. 
 
116 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 There was still, however, a neutral ground 
 between the humiliations of the village and 
 the triumphs of the university, where conso- 
 lation was in store. A short visit to Fair- 
 ford, on his way back to Cambridge, renewed 
 his aspirings and comforted his self-esteem. 
 To the arms of Peter Parmenter, he was 
 welcomed as a more than disciple; and to 
 the veneration of the college and even town 
 of Fairford, as an honour to its name. The 
 mayor happened to have a booby son study- 
 ing for his degree, by whom the triumphs 
 of Jervis Cleve had been wonderingly re- 
 ported ; and as much was known and thought 
 of the poor college-boy thrust upon them 
 by Sir William Davenport, as could be 
 expected in a town blackened with the 
 smoke of factory chimnies, and deafened by 
 the whirring of engine wheels. 
 
 But it was to the college only, with its 
 dull cloisters so deteriorated in his admira- 
 tion by recent familiarization with the state- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 117 
 
 Her arcades of the university, that his visit 
 was addressed; and, seated beside the well- 
 known black tea-board of Peter Parmenter, 
 the grateful scholar and the pedagogue over- 
 flowing with graciousness, sat conversing of 
 studies past, and honours to come ; of the 
 seed sowed by the master and the fruit to 
 be reaped by the pupil. It might be perhaps, 
 (for in what human nature riseth not the 
 leaven of human frailty?) it might be that 
 the pupil had been dearer to the master while 
 his person was disfigured by the badge of 
 college servitude than now, in its spruce, 
 black, lustrous suit of independence ; and 
 that, hateful as were the woollen crumpet 
 and leather shorts in the eyes of Mrs Hecks- 
 worth, custom had rendered them lovely as 
 the wedding-garment of the parable, in the 
 eyes of Peter. 
 
 But he soon overcame the petty weakness ; 
 and was as willing to unfold to the Fairford 
 youth his theory of the art of rising in 
 
118 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 the world, as he had been to develop to Jervy 
 Cleve the Principia of Newton, or the philo- 
 sophy of Plato. 
 
 Unluckily, his classical proficiency was the 
 more eminent of the two. Destined to drudge 
 through life, from grammar-school boy to 
 grammar-school usher and master, the ob- 
 ject of Peter Parmenter's devouring ambi- 
 tion, from his youth upwards, had been acad- 
 emic distinction. To inscribe himself " Gra- 
 duate of a university" was to his thinking to 
 be enrolled in the chronicles of immortality ; 
 and on the title-pages of his favourite works, 
 the initials M. and A. affixed to the names 
 of the authors, were to him a sufficient cha- 
 racteristic of the man of letters. But for 
 his own want of such distinctions, he might 
 have written himself clerk instead of school- 
 master ; or, in place of his brown studies and 
 brown suits, have figured in a cassock and 
 band, in pulpit and parsonage, as a reverend 
 because learned divine. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 119 
 
 That the scholar of his creation should af- 
 fect any other road to distinction, appeared to 
 Peter impossible; and his greetings and con- 
 gratulations were followed by a remark that, 
 in a couple of years, Jervis would probably 
 be holding a curacy, perhaps at Bilston, 
 perhaps at Fairford; and a hint that his 
 patron, Sir William Davenport, was possessed 
 of church patronage to the amount of two 
 thousand per annum! 
 
 " Which, for three reasons, Sir, will never 
 be available to me! " observed Cleve with a 
 smile. a ln the first place, it is very un- 
 likely that he would give a family living to 
 a person of my condition in life ; secondly, 
 it is his son, Mr Davenport, (to whom 
 I am a stranger,) who now regulates all 
 such matters at the Grange ; and thirdly, 
 I have not the smallest desire to enter the 
 church ! " 
 
 "No desire to enter the church ?" cried 
 Parmenter, setting down his tea-cup in dis- 
 
120 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 may. " My dear boy ! of what are you 
 thinking ?" 
 
 " Of my future respectability in life. Were 
 I a young man destined from childhood (as I 
 know many, sir, at Cambridge) to administer 
 to the ecclesiastical portion of their family 
 property as their elder brothers are educated 
 to administer to the temporal, I should sub- 
 mit to the appointment of my family. But 
 I am conscious of no vocation to take orders. 
 I feel more disposed in matters of divinity to 
 be taught, than become a teacher ; and though 
 I hear of little else at Cambridge but the 
 value of livings and the certainty of being 
 provided for in embracing the clerical pro- 
 fession, I would not attain my loaves and 
 fishes at the cost of my conscience. Should I 
 be so happy as to justify the expectations 
 formed of me, I mean to try for a travelling 
 fellowship. I wish to visit the continent." 
 
 " Happy youth ! " involuntarily ejaculated 
 Peter Parmenter. " Perhaps the country of 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 121 
 
 Ovid and Virgil! Nay! it appears a not 
 unusual aim of modern enterprise, to perform 
 a pilgrimage even unto Athens itself! You 
 will, peradventure, taste at their fountain head 
 the waters of Helicon ; or pluck a leaf from 
 the sacred laurels of Virgil's tomb!" 
 
 " My ambition extends still further," ob- 
 served Jervis, modestly. " I am anxious, sir, 
 to visit the New World." 
 
 " To cross the vast Atlantic ! " exclaimed 
 Peter, who did not accomplish above once in 
 eight days the task of crossing the weedy 
 court-yard. 
 
 " And perhaps," added young Cleve, no- 
 thing daunted by the amazement of his 
 sometime preceptor, " I may at some future 
 time enlarge the limits of modern discovery, 
 by a journey into the interior of Africa." 
 
 " ' Enrich the world's contemporaneous mind, 
 And amplify the picture of mankind ! ' " 
 
 ejaculated Peter, with uplifted hands and 
 fitting emphasis ; glancing from his cracked 
 teacup towards the chart upon the wall, which, 
 
 VOL. I. G 
 
122 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 though now jaundiced by smoke, accredited 
 the early aspirings of the future geographer. 
 
 And as he gazed upon the intelligent coun- 
 tenance of the young scholar, and listened to 
 these gigantic projects, the old man, if proud 
 of his pupil, felt prouder of himself ; as a 
 goose might feel, which, having cackled 
 over an eagle's egg, beheld the first sun- 
 ward flight of its fledgling ! 
 
 " But your country, my dear boy, your 
 family, Fairford, Bilston ! " demanded the 
 old schoolmaster, when at length sublunary 
 considerations broke palely in upon his vi- 
 sions of glory. 
 
 " Few young men of any condition of life 
 are able to give their early years to the 
 comforts and affections of home," said Jervis. 
 "As a soldier, as a sailor, I should be sta- 
 tioned, perhaps, in India or some western 
 colony. My own brothers, though their hum- 
 ble callings are pursued in this very county, 
 do not above once in a twelvemonth visit 
 my father's hearth ; and I conceive that, out 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 of my allotted income, I might set apart as 
 large a portion for the benefit of my family 
 as, in the other case, duty would allow me 
 to subtract from the stipend assigned to 
 support my respectability as a minister of the 
 Gospel. But there will be time enough, dear 
 sir, to consult you on these points, before I am 
 compelled to make my election. I have still 
 two years before me of rigorous application." 
 
 It was not, of course, in the simple nature 
 of Peter Parmenter, undeveloped by ties of 
 human tenderness, to conjecture the morti- 
 fications experienced by his pupil, at Bilston; 
 or the sort of moral isolation in the midst 
 of his nearest connexions, which suggested 
 the self-purposed banishment of the young 
 scholar. He beheld Jervis Cleve depart to 
 pursue his academic career, secure only 
 that the principles of his young friend would 
 render it an honest and an honourable; 
 and humbly trusting that the protection of 
 Providence and the Muses might render it 
 happy and prosperous. 
 
 G2 
 
124 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Riches, the wisest monarch sings, 
 
 Make pinions for themselves to fly ; 
 They fly like bats on parchment wings, 
 
 And geese their silver plumes supply. 
 No money left for squand'ring heirs, 
 
 Bills turn their lenders into debtors, 
 The wish of Nero now is theirs 
 
 That they had never known their letters. 
 
 SWIFT. 
 
 IT is surprising how much more sedulously 
 we note transitions in national costume than 
 in national customs ; and in national customs, 
 than the moral influences from which they are 
 deduced. Changes of dress are carefully 
 recorded in our books ; changes in decency or 
 decorum very rarely. We are fond of expa- 
 tiating upon the wonderful fact that our grand- 
 sires should have worn ruffles, our grand- 
 dames high-heeled shoes; and love to dilate 
 upon the abrogation of hair-powder and 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 125 
 
 stomachers, pigtails and periwigs. We laugh 
 heartily at the idea of dining at three o'clock, 
 crowning the evening with a hot supper, and 
 the night with nightmare, and are amazed 
 that modern dinners should be postponed till 
 eight; but do not trouble ourselves to marvel 
 that children should have begun to treat their 
 parents as playthings, and parents to show 
 deference, in their turn, towards their own 
 children. 
 
 English people, warmer and more sanguine 
 in their character than might be assumed from 
 their deportment, are not only ardent in their 
 repentance of a fault, but apt to run into a 
 contrary extreme. Till the close of the last 
 century, the buckram of English costume 
 extending its influence to our domestic habits, 
 children were kept at arms' length by their 
 parents, and grown up sons and daughters 
 treated as children. But from this fierce ex- 
 treme we have rushed into another ! Armour 
 of steel has been exchanged for the loosest 
 
126 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 dishabille, till the rising generation become 
 the legislators of the hour. 
 
 Lord and Lady Hillingdon would probably 
 have justified, by a thousand living examples, 
 their weak indulgence of their son and heir; 
 though rarely has the prerogative of eldest 
 sonhood been exercised with greater despotism 
 than by George Joddrell. George had never 
 been a child, and was not now a man; that 
 is, he was devoid of all the generous sentiments 
 of a manly nature. As puppies are dwarfed 
 by early libations of strong potables, his 
 character had been withered from its allotted 
 proportions, by untimely collision with the 
 excitements of life. His passions were all 
 sensual. There was neither tenderness nor 
 truth in his composition. 
 
 Portrayed in this harsh relief, such a 
 character stands forth from the canvas only 
 as a warning and example. But though the 
 kite, when nailed against the barn door, may 
 be revolting, when poised aloft on glossy wing 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 127 
 
 it is a dangerous bird ; and the gay, fluttering, 
 handsome George, amid the giddy scenes of 
 the fashionable world, was not altogether 
 harmless. A finer young man, a man whose 
 manners were more ingratiating, could not be 
 pointed out. His smiles were, when he chose, 
 so engaging, his conversation so amusing, that 
 his family seemed almost justified in the eyes 
 of the world for their deference to the whims 
 and fancies of so fascinating a creature. 
 
 " This letter is not for me. Take it to Mr 
 Joddrell," said his sister Agatha one morning 
 to the butler, soon after the arrival of the 
 family in town. 
 
 " How absurd to disturb your brother about 
 a foolish note, when you know his eyes are 
 never open at this time of day!" observed 
 Lady Hillingdon, who was lounging on a sofa 
 at the further extremity of the drawing-room, 
 with a new novel half open, and her eyes half 
 shut. " George will not be down these two 
 hours ; Francois is not allowed to take in his 
 
128 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 breakfast till twelve; and then, lie has his 
 toilet to go through. Leave the note here, 
 Stratton!" continued her ladyship, who had 
 motives of her own for wishing to examine the 
 hand-writing. 
 
 " Mr Joddrell has given orders that his notes 
 are to be delivered only into his own hands, 
 my lady," replied the butler. " The servant 
 who brought this, said it was urgent; I fancy 
 I had better take it to Mr JoddrelTs room." 
 And without waiting for a reply, he quitted 
 the room. 
 
 " How tiresome ! " exclaimed Lady Hilling- 
 don, starting up, forgetful of her nonchalance 
 and her novel. " I am convinced it came 
 from her. Mary! go and desire Ma'mselle 
 Mathilde to run and ascertain from the 
 people in the hall the livery of the servant 
 who brought that letter." 
 
 To hear such a mother was to obey. But 
 Mary Joddrell could not help wondering as 
 she went, how mamma could for a moment 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 129 
 
 suppose that Mademoiselle Mathilde would 
 " run" at any one's bidding, or do anything 
 whatever at hers! 
 
 " I can't make out George ! " gfumbled her 
 ladyship, resuming her horizontal position on 
 the sofa, and apparently addressing her lap- 
 dog. "It is very difficult to guess what he 
 would be at." 
 
 "Do you really think so, mamma?" replied 
 her daughter Agatha, mistaking herself for the 
 favoured object of apostrophe. "And yet 
 he is so extremely frank!" 
 
 "He has the sort of recklessness which 
 people mistake for frankness. But I doubt 
 whether any one ever got at anything which 
 George was interested to conceal." 
 
 " Most people have their reserves, I suppose; 
 my brother, surely, as few as any one." 
 
 " I don't know. I used to think him open 
 when he came down to Brighton for a day or 
 two, and had nothing to tell worth keeping to 
 himself, or that I cared to ascertain. But 
 
 G3 
 
130 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 now that I am anxious to understand his 
 carte du pays, I can make nothing out of 
 him." 
 
 " But could you not ask him anything you 
 wanted to know?" 
 
 Lady Hillingdon replied by a glance of com- 
 passion. " Ever since we came to town," said 
 she, " I have been attempting to discover 
 whether but no matter ! It is not of the 
 least consequence to you, and very little to 
 me." 
 
 Lady Hillingdon had, in fact, a variety of 
 affairs and interests to distract her attention. 
 It was surprising how speedily she had con- 
 trived, on settling in town, to expand into the 
 position she intended to occupy in the eyes of 
 the beau monde. Endowed with a mind 
 originally flimsy and unstrengthened by cul- 
 tivation, collision with the world had imparted 
 sharpness to that which wanted force, and 
 placed a rapier in the hand unequal to wield 
 a falchion. During the first ten years of her 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 131 
 
 married life, when extravagance was followed 
 by embarrassment, the rude shocks occasion- 
 ally experienced by the pride of the silly 
 beauty had in some degree brought her to 
 herself. In spite of the affectation she had 
 adopted as a resource against utter inanity, 
 she had been compelled to see men and things 
 in clear daylight; to admit that her vacant 
 useless prettiness had lost all attraction in the 
 eyes of her husband, and established for her 
 no influence in society ; and thus maltreated 
 by Lord Hillingdon and the world, she had 
 vegetated in peevish selfishness; with only a 
 bosom friend or two, a Lady Ursula and a 
 Lord Charles, as victims of her murmurs, till 
 her son attained the power of replacing her in 
 her former brilliant position. 
 
 As the period thus anxiously desired ap- 
 proached, however, Lady Hillingdon's confi- 
 dence in George's intentions grew less and 
 less. The eager schoolboy, thankful for undue 
 indulgence, was growing up into the cool, 
 
132 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 careless young man; and, worse still, his sis- 
 ters, whom Lady Hillingdon rarely included 
 in her calculations, were encroaching on the in- 
 fluence over his mind which she had intended 
 to monopolize. It was not that he cared 
 very much for Mary and Agatha, but he 
 cared more for them than for the calculating 
 egotist who had petted his boyhood into folly, 
 ruined his digestion, and spoiled his temper. 
 
 There was every plea in favour of this bro- 
 therly predilection. The girls were so kind- 
 hearted, so considerate, Mary was so mild, 
 and Agatha, when at ease in their little circle, 
 so amusing, that a colder-hearted brother might 
 have been fond of them. 
 
 They were pleasant to live with. There was 
 no attempt at display, no straining after effect. 
 They were pretty enough to make an agree- 
 able impression; clever enough to appreciate 
 the cleverness of others. They listened well, 
 admired honestly, felt warmly, decided up- 
 rightly; were dutiful daughters to unworthy 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 133 
 
 parents, and affectionate sisters to a reckless 
 and unamiable brother. 
 
 Though they had borne unmurmuringly the 
 seclusion to which their childhood was con- 
 demned, believing it the unavoidable result of 
 the embarrassment of their father's affairs, 
 two pretty girls of eighteen and nineteen 
 were not likely to learn without emotion that 
 they were to pass their next season in town, 
 surrounded by the advantages to which they 
 had hitherto been strangers. Nor were the 
 explanations so minutely imparted by Lady 
 Hillingdon to her bosom friend extended to 
 her daughters ; and, ignorant of the ruinous 
 arrangements made by George and their 
 father, they were prepared to enjoy their 
 pleasant prospects with all the ardour of 
 youth and experience. The mighty talisman 
 called ready money had prepared the way. 
 A good house had been engaged, a good es- 
 tablishment set up, and the surface of things 
 was without spot or blemish. 
 
134 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 In a place where principle and consistency 
 maintain so little influence as in western Lon- 
 don, it is difficult to calculate beforehand 
 upon the station any individual is to assume 
 in the throng. Fashionable society is subject 
 to as many and as unaccountable transitions 
 as that grand atmospheric enigma, the Eng- 
 lish climate. Sunshine and east wind enter 
 sometimes into fatal combination ; and the day 
 that commences with a bitter frost scorches 
 our eyes out with its meridian blaze, to 
 subside anew into utter chilliness towards 
 evening. Even as regards the more serious 
 point of character, opinion is often deter- 
 mined by the gust or jest of the hour ; and 
 an epigram or caricature may sink a reputa- 
 tion which had previously defied the typhoons 
 of a legal tribunal. 
 
 Now Lady Hillingdon's reputation, among 
 other casual commodities, had been nearly 
 whispered away in early life. At the period 
 when her husband, having deserted her for 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 135 
 
 Newmarket, Lord Charles Grantingham was 
 occasionally seen to enter her house, and less 
 occasionally to leave it, Lord Hillingdon's 
 stiff relations and her own dear friends, 
 instead of flying to her with advice and re- 
 monstrance, stood aloof and shook their heads. 
 In place of accusing her of being a bad mo- 
 ther which was a fact undeniable, they 
 reviled her for being an indifferent wife, a 
 point on which the person best qualified to 
 decide, uttered no accusation ; and by repeating 
 in all directions that they hoped they really 
 hoped and trusted there was no harm in her, 
 raised a supposition that there was. 
 
 Lady Hillingdon's fair fame might, how- 
 ever, have defied these passing clouds, had 
 the star of her fortunes been still resplendent. 
 Possessed of a good establishment in London, 
 a good cook, good equipage, good opera-box, 
 good everything but principles, Lord Charles 
 might have come still oftener into her house, 
 and left it still less frequently, without pro- 
 
136 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 ducing an unsatisfactory impression on the 
 public mind. 
 
 But when the gay world understood that 
 Lady Hillingdon had sunk beneath low- water 
 mark, that her pretended necessity for sea- 
 bathing was occasioned by a real necessity for 
 retrenchment, they decided that she was 
 "really too bad!" 
 
 They did not strike her name out of their 
 visiting lists indeed, for she was not likely 
 to return to her post and profit by her pri- 
 vilege; but her ostracism was silent, con- 
 temptuous, and complete. 
 
 Had she, after this, crept her way back 
 again to indulge her taste for dissipation by 
 a few weeks' sojourn at an hotel without the 
 possibility of entertaining the world to excuse 
 her pretensions to being entertained, her pre- 
 sumption would probably have been requited 
 by total neglect. Nay, even with her capital 
 house in Hill street and all the rest of her 
 present attributions, she might have been 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 137 
 
 taught, as the mere mother of daughters, the 
 precariousness of her position. 
 
 But her safeguard was in her son, her 
 only son, her son and heir ! Lord Hilling- 
 don's estates were encumbered, but una- 
 lienable. George Joddrell would succeed to 
 a property as handsome as his person. Al- 
 ready, his Eton and Oxford fame had pre- 
 ceded him ; already, George was the fashion. 
 The honour of his smile conferred distinction; 
 the honour of his hand would confer a peer- 
 age. Mammas and chaperons accordingly 
 got up a prodigious show of hands in his 
 favour ; and the first exercise of these was to 
 bestow several rounds of applause upon the 
 debut of Lady Hillingdon and the Hon. 
 Misses Joddrell. Her re-appearance, in fact, 
 was a welcome event. A squirrel in a cage, 
 which pursues its monotonous round from 
 summer to summer, as though it had forgot- 
 ten the gay green wood and glorious air of 
 liberty, is not condemned to a more monoto- 
 
138 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 nous existence than the fashionable world in 
 the unvarying routine of its amusements ; 
 and when a London beauty expands into 
 ecstasies concerning the delights of London to 
 some country neighbour on a foggy autumn 
 day, vaguely alluding to the " countless" 
 pleasures and " diversified " amusements of 
 London, the country neighbour may be as- 
 sured that the truth is not in her. 
 
 Nothing can be more minutely monotonous 
 than the recreations of the really fashionable ; 
 monotony being, in fact, essential to that dis- 
 tinction. Tigers may amuse themselves in a 
 thousand irregularly diverting ways ; but 
 the career of the genuine exclusive is one 
 to which a mill-horse would scarcely look for 
 relief. 
 
 London houses, London establishments, are 
 formed after the same unvariable model. At 
 the fifty or sixty balls to which she is to be 
 indebted for the excitement of her season, 
 the fine lady listens to the same band, is 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 139 
 
 refreshed from a buffet prepared by the same 
 skill, looks at the same diamonds, hears the 
 same trivial observations; and but for an in- 
 cident or two, the growth of her own follies, 
 might find it difficult to point out the slight- 
 est difference between the fete of the countess 
 on the first of June, and that of the marquis 
 on the first of July. 
 
 But though twenty seasons' experience of 
 these desolating facts might be expected to 
 damp the ardour of certain dowagers and 
 dandies, who are to be found hurrying along 
 the golden railroad year after year, it is not 
 wonderful that the young girls their daugh- 
 ters should be easily allured from their dull 
 schoolrooms by fallacious promises of plea- 
 sure. Agatha and Mary Joddrell, who had 
 rarely been tolerated for an hour or two in 
 presence of Lady Hillingdon's conferences 
 with Lady Ursula, without hearing the bosom 
 friends recur to dear London and its plea- 
 sures as to a forbidden Eden, were naturally 
 
140 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 delighted to find their mother's table in Hill 
 street covered every morning with cards and 
 notes of invitation. For the point once de- 
 cided that Lady Hillingdon was to be visited, 
 Lady Hillingdon soon contrived to make 
 herself the fashion. Her quiet, ladylike girls 
 were far from a drawback on her popularity ; 
 and after their first fortnight in London, they 
 were as much sought as guests and partners 
 as if they had been able to assist in private 
 theatricals or play in charades. 
 
 " So, children ! you were at Lady Eeigate's 
 last night!" was their brother's morning 
 salutation, an hour or two after Lady Hill- 
 ingdon had interfered to secure him from 
 disturbance. "Were you horribly bored!" 
 
 " Bored ? On the contrary, it was a 
 charming ball! Agatha danced seven qua- 
 drilles, and I six ! " replied Mary. 
 
 " Seven quadrilles ! A sister of mine ! 
 Pray do not let me hear of your degenerating 
 into dancing young ladies, ready to snatch at a 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 141 
 
 partner before his c May I have the honour ' 
 
 is half out of his mouth! Two quadrilles 
 
 and a waltz is the utmost I can allow between 
 
 you in the course of an evening." 
 
 " But mamma would become tired of us 
 
 if attached to her side the whole evening. 
 
 She and Lady Ursula generally sit together 
 
 in some out-of-the-way corner." 
 " Sit with them, for the future." 
 " I am sure they would not like it." 
 " Sit with some other person, then." 
 " At present we know so few people in 
 
 town," remonstrated Agatha. 
 
 Involuntarily her brother glanced at the 
 
 pile of cards waiting for inscription in their 
 
 book. 
 
 " Yes, we visit all the world ; but who 
 
 introduces anything but partners, to girls 
 
 likens?" 
 
 "There is the governor's sister, Lady 
 
 Newbery, who would be delighted at having 
 
 two new misses to inflict upon her friends." 
 
142 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 " I doubt whether she is on good terms 
 with mamma. We have seen nothing of 
 her." 
 
 " Nor of my aunt Sophia!" added her 
 sister. " Is it not strange ?" 
 
 " The Clutterbucks belong to another 
 world. There was no occasion for you to 
 see them. In fact, the less you know of 
 them the better." 
 
 " But our cousins are said to be such 
 charming girls ! I recollect hearing from 
 a Mrs Smith, who brought us letters from 
 aunt Sophia to Brighton, that " 
 
 " Oh ! spare me your Mrs Smithisms ! 
 The girls may be as charming as you please, 
 but there is and ought to be, nothing in 
 common between you." 
 
 "Did you receive your letter, George?" 
 inquired Agatha. 
 
 " What letter ? " 
 
 " One that Stratton said he was to de- 
 liver to your own hand." 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 143 
 
 " Where is her excellent ladyship this 
 morning ?" suddenly demanded Mr Joddrell, 
 who was in the habit of voting his sister's 
 questions frivolous and vexatious. 
 
 " Mamma is gone to order our plumes." 
 
 " Ay, by the way, you are to be at the 
 
 drawing-room on Thursday. The Honourable 
 
 Agatha and Mary Joddrell by let me 
 
 see! Who is to present you?" 
 
 " I really have not heard," said Mary, 
 looking inquiringly at Agatha. 
 " And really have not asked?" 
 " I concluded it would be mamma." 
 " Not having been to court during the pre- 
 sent reign, she must be presented herself." 
 " Then I should think it would be Lady 
 Ursula Wainwright." 
 
 " I should imagine not! I should hope 
 not! Lady Hillingdon would not so com- 
 pletely trifle with my opinion ! My mother 
 ought to know, by this time, what I feel 
 towards Lady Ursula." 
 
144 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 " But, my dearest George, you do not 
 imagine that mamma would think it ne- 
 cessary to defer to your whims on such a 
 point?' 7 said Agatha, with surprise. 
 
 " Mary, my dear, come and bring me the 
 quilted pillow from the other sofa," said 
 Joddrell, stretching himself ; " I'm quite 
 knocked up this morning! I was not at 
 home till five. There! put it under my 
 head." 
 
 " Up till five, yet you never came 
 to Lady Reigate's. We were so disap- 
 pointed." 
 
 " I have already warned you not to ex- 
 pect me in any ball-room this season. 
 I abhor balls. I hate to see a woman 
 tricked out in silks and satins. I detest 
 heat, and glare, and dust ! " 
 
 " And what do you like ? " inquired 
 Agatha, gravely. 
 
 " Melton, from November till April ; 
 Paris, from April to June ; Cowes, from 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 145 
 
 July to August ; the moors from August to 
 September ; and during September and Oc- 
 tober, any fellow's place in the country, 
 where the claret is tolerably light and the 
 game-book tolerably heavy. By the way, 
 Agatha, I caught a glimpse of you the other 
 night at the opera, going out on the arm 
 of Dick Davenport. His father died last 
 winter ; and I'm told his preserves are 
 the best in the county. I beg you will 
 make yourself agreeable to the country 
 baronet, that he may make himself agreeable 
 to me." 
 
 " I should think he would find it diffi- 
 cult to be agreeable to any one," replied 
 Agatha ; "I never saw a less attractive 
 person! Lady Ursula presented him to us 
 at Almack's, which I conclude he resented 
 as an injury ; for he has done nothing 
 since but contemplate us with supreme con- 
 tempt, contradict every observation we 
 make, and infer by his remarks on every 
 
 YOL. I. H 
 
146 PEERS AND PARYENUS. 
 
 creature of our acquaintance, that he con- 
 siders them and us immeasurably beneath 
 his notice." 
 
 " And so you are, child ! You have no 
 battues to give your friends. What right 
 have you to expect a fellow like Davenport 
 to think your opinions worth listening to ? 
 He pays you twice as great a compliment 
 as you deserve, by lending you his arm 
 to your carriage. That is the utmost a 
 miss in her first season has a right to 
 require from such a man." 
 
 " But if you were at the opera your- 
 self on Saturday, why did you not come 
 to us?" 
 
 " Thank you ! I was better amused. 
 Who dines here to-day?" 
 
 " We are all engaged to Lady Clara 
 Heathcote's." 
 
 "All? You don't mean to say that you 
 are both going?" 
 
 " I should be delighted to give you up 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 147 
 
 my place," said Mary, fancying that her 
 
 brother wished to be of the party. 
 
 "I am not in the habit of performing 
 
 penance at family dinner parties, even 
 where Lord and Lady Hillingdon are not 
 included," replied Joddrell, with some so- 
 lemnity. 
 
 " Why were you so vexed, then, at the 
 idea of our both dining with Lady Clara ? " 
 
 " Because young ladies have no business 
 at dinner parties. They are either shy and 
 stupid, or talk when they had better hold 
 their tongues. Misses either talk like fools 
 or ought!" 
 
 " A silent guest," said Mary, " breaks up 
 the cheerfulness of the circle." 
 
 " Precisely for which reason, you ought 
 to stay at home. A girl has no business 
 to open her lips among reasonable people." 
 
 " I assure you the party we met yester- 
 day at Mrs Micklethwaite's were anything 
 
 H2 
 
148 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 but reasonable people!" said Mary, with 
 some archness. 
 
 " The Micklethwaites ? You dined yester- 
 day at the Micklethwaites ? What could 
 induce them to ask you. I sent them my 
 excuse a fortnight ago : and as the only 
 object they have in your acquaintance is to 
 catch me for their daughters." 
 
 " Oh ! George you really are too bad ! " 
 cried both his sisters. 
 
 " They might have waited till they knew 
 my intentions," concluded George ; " poor 
 Mrs Mick has wasted her powder and shot 
 poor Mrs Mick has thrown away a dinner 
 party ! " 
 
 " Oh ! no ; I have not seen papa in 
 such good spirits since we came to town." 
 
 "Why, whom had you?" 
 
 " No one I ever saw before ; a Lord 
 and Lady Quebec." 
 
 "Oho 1 "- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 149 
 
 " And Sir Robert and Lady Dashwood." 
 
 " Aha!" 
 
 "You forget Lord Charles Grantingham, 
 Mary," said Agatha. 
 
 " Lord Charles, too ! Mrs Mickleth- 
 waite's plans are more deeply laid than I 
 imagined ! I must be on my guard." 
 
 " How are you, George ? Good morning, 
 young ladies," said Lord Hillingdon, sud- 
 denly entering the room ; no longer the 
 good-humoured, warm-hearted bridegroom of 
 Emma Corbet ; but a harsh, discontented, 
 man, oldened by the gnawing influence of 
 care ; his cheeks lanky and yellow, his nose 
 tinged with excess, his eyes sunk, his brow 
 wrinkled, his hand tremulous ; redeemed 
 from the disparagement attending vulgar 
 dissipation, only so far as the efforts of 
 the best English tailor and best French 
 valet, still availed to endow him with an 
 air distingue. 
 
 " I want to speak a word with you, George, 
 
150 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 before I go to the club. When will it be 
 agreeable for you to accompany me to Lin- 
 coln's inn ? " added he, again addressing his 
 son.. 
 
 "I can't conceive such an expedition being 
 ever agreeable ! " said Joddrell, throwing 
 his person from a recumbent position into a 
 sitting posture, scarcely less becoming and 
 disrespectful. 
 
 " Well then," said his father, not daring 
 to take offence, and disguising his vexation 
 under an affectation of jocularity, let us 
 amend our motion. When shall you be able 
 and willing to come with me to my law- 
 yers." 
 
 "Not to-day, certainly." 
 
 '*! did not think of to-day. We should 
 not be there till Lattitat's chambers were 
 closed. But to-morrow ? " 
 
 " To-morrow, I am engaged. " 
 
 " On Friday, then ? " 
 
 "On Friday, Harry Hartopp is to try 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 151 
 
 some horses for me to Eichmond. We shall 
 go early and most likely dine there." 
 
 " Sir Harry Hartopp ? have you got 
 into his hands ? Take care, my dear boy, 
 what you are about ! " involuntarily exclaimed 
 the father, who through life had taken so 
 little care of his own pocket or reputation. 
 "Can you oblige me, then, on Saturday?" 
 
 " Saturday, I have promised to be at re- 
 hearsal. Lumley wants my opinion of a new 
 coryphee." 
 
 " In one word, George," said Lord Hill- 
 ingdon, his cheeks waxing somewhat yel- 
 lower and his nose a shade redder, with 
 rising wrath at such callous insolence, "it 
 is out of my power to let you have the five 
 hundred you asked me for, unless our business 
 is terminated in the course of the week." 
 
 " Oh ! never mind, damn the five hun- 
 dred pounds ! Hartopp will let me have it, 
 and as much more." 
 
 " That he may win it back at chicken 
 
152 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 hazard, after your dinner at the Star and 
 Garter ?" demanded Lord Hillingdon. 
 
 " Half a dozen other fellows would ac- 
 commodate me." 
 
 " I must trouble you with five minutes 7 
 conversation in your dressing-room/' said 
 Lord Hillingdon, changing colour when he 
 discerned that it was the purpose of his son 
 to harass him with delays, fatal to both ; and 
 unwilling that the girls should be unnecessa- 
 rily admitted behind the scenes of their family 
 affairs. And with an offensive gesture of 
 impatience at the proposal and the trouble 
 inflicted upon him, Joddrell sauntered with 
 his father out of the drawing-room. 
 
 "What can all this mean?" inquired 
 Mary of her sister, as the door closed after 
 them, her cheeks glowing with indignation 
 at her brother's deportment. 
 
 "I cannot imagine, I do not presume 
 even to guess," replied Agatha, with a sad- 
 dened countenance. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 153 
 
 " I wish I dare speak to George ! " per- 
 sisted Mary. "I am sure he cannot be 
 aware in how disrespectful a manner he ad- 
 dresses my father. It is doubtless the tone 
 assumed by other fashionable young men. 
 But George, who is so clever and so charm- 
 ing, ought to afford an exception to so vile 
 a system ! " 
 
 Agatha made no reply. She stood list- 
 lessly turning over the leaves of a music- 
 book. But the poor girl was in reality 
 concealing the tears called forth by her 
 dawning perception of the hollow state of 
 things around her, and the disgraceful re- 
 lative position of her father and brother. J 
 
 H 3 
 
154 PEERS AND PAEVENUS. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 It is a note 
 
 Of upstart greatness to observe those trifles 
 Which noble minds neglect. BEN JONSON. 
 
 To trace circumstantially the progress of an 
 unincidental life may be a curious study to 
 the philosopher, but it is sad dull work for 
 the novelist. The college life of Jervis Cleve 
 was marked only by the acquirement of know- 
 ledge. One examination foretold another, and 
 one prize certified another. There was no 
 drawback on the brightness of his career. 
 His conduct was as irreproachable as his 
 application was unexampled. 
 
 It needs not to have gone through the 
 university to be aware that, to inhabit Cam- 
 bridge or Oxford for a year or two in the 
 gown and cap of a fellow commoner or a 
 
PEERS AND PARVEKUS. 155 
 
 gentleman commoner, is as essential a mark of 
 caste to such heroes as George Joddrell, as it 
 is indispensable to drudge through them in 
 serge, for the destined member of a learned 
 profession. At rare epochs, perhaps, the 
 drinkers of claret and followers of fox- 
 hounds predominate, but for the most part 
 science assumes her due ascendency. There 
 are moments too, when the winter sky is 
 illustrated by brilliant comets in addition to 
 its glorious constellations ; and the seats of 
 learning acquire sudden illustration from some 
 Northern light or Macaulay of the minute. 
 
 Happily for Jervis Cleve, it was at such 
 a time his period of study was appointed. A 
 member of the university having recently 
 rendered his high college honours prefatory 
 to unparalleled triumphs in the senate, had 
 just then brought learning into vogue ; and 
 no distinction exceeded in influence the dis- 
 tinctions of talent. Cambridge, accordingly, 
 became as proud as Fairford of its " ambi- 
 
156 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 tious student in ill-health ;" and was covetous 
 of his fame as participating by reflection in 
 his triumph. The college dons would not 
 have forgiven him, had he disappointed the 
 miraculous promise their vauntings had an- 
 nounced to the world. They were delighted 
 for once to afford evidence, that mathema- 
 tical proficiency may be united with literary 
 taste and classical knowledge. 
 
 From the powers that were, this predilec- 
 tion soon extended to their scholars. For the 
 last thirty years, indeed, literature has been 
 cultivated in England as one of the aristo- 
 cratic graces. Lord A. writes histories of 
 countries with whose history all the world 
 is familiar; Lord B. publishes memoirs of a 
 statesman, whose private life exhibits a blank 
 and whose public is as public as Westminster 
 Abbey ; Lord C. indites a most comical tra- 
 gedy ; Lord D. a most tragical comedy, while 
 
 Lord Thomas has written a novel, 
 A novel of elegant life. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 157 
 
 The favour, therefore, which at the close 
 of the eighteenth century, would have been 
 bestowed by Cantab acclamation on a three- 
 bottle man, whose rooms were adorned with 
 foxs' brushes and indecent caricatures, rested 
 during the early quarter of the nineteenth, 
 the age of Scott and Byron, upon brows 
 destined for the laurel, and any humble stu- 
 dent by whose labours a page was likely to be 
 added to the annals of scientific discovery. 
 
 The person of Cleve, of St John's, Cleve 
 the Fairford youth, the famous Cleve, was 
 as well known in the university as that of 
 the Master of Trinity; and it must be ad- 
 mitted that his person did much to improve 
 the favourable impression produced by his 
 talents. The feebleness of his early years 
 imparted a character of elegance to the deli- 
 cate organization of the rustic's son. Dis- 
 qualified for the sterner labours of life, the 
 countenance of the young student, his fine 
 features, his almost unnatural paleness, 
 
158 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 seemed to realize one of the intellectual-look- 
 ing portraits of Kaphael or Titian: to bor- 
 row the words of a true poet, 
 
 Wisdom looked sweet and inward from his eye, 
 And round his mouth was sensibility. 
 
 The lightest jester among the noble dunces 
 of the university, was never known to vent 
 his mockeries upon Jervis Cleve; whose un- 
 assuming manners, and gentle deportment, 
 were more ingratiating than mere forms of 
 artificial gentility. 
 
 " Are you acquainted, then, with Cleve?" 
 inquired Herbert Davenport of the young 
 Duke of Attleborough, on perceiving him 
 nod familiarly to the pride of St John's, as, 
 with their greyhounds at their heels, they 
 passed him one evening on the Trumpington 
 road. 
 
 " To be sure I am. A capital fellow ! 
 Not a more gentlemanly man in the univer- 
 sity so unpretending, so amiable. From his 
 manner, you would never guess that he was 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 159 
 
 in the slightest degree superior to the rest 
 of us." 
 
 " Superior ? " exclaimed Davenport, in a 
 tone as ironical as a professed tuft-hunter 
 can venture in presence of a duke. " Why, 
 do you know who he 2*5?" 
 
 "To be sure I do ; the first scholar of 
 the day, the best mathematician since New- 
 ton ! " 
 
 " I don't mean that" 
 
 "What do you mean, then. Your eyes 
 must inform you that he is a devilish good- 
 looking fellow?" 
 
 "I don't mean that. Good-looking? So 
 is yonder carter in his smock-frock ! " 
 
 " Has the carter in the smock-frock Cleve's 
 fine Byronic forehead and graceful man- 
 ners?" 
 
 " Graceful manners! My dear Attlebo- 
 rough, you must be out of your mind! 
 Cleve of St John's is neither more nor less 
 than the son of a day-labourer, put forward 
 
160 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 by the charity of my late uncle, Sir William 
 Davenport." 
 
 " Then your late uncle Sir William Daven- 
 port has something to be proud of. It is not 
 often that country baronets are so useful in 
 their generation ! I advise the Davenport 
 family to record the fact upon his tomb- 
 stone." 
 
 " But though you speak so highly of this 
 wonderful scholar," sneered Herbert Daven- 
 port, who was on the verge of losing his 
 temper, " I never saw him in your com- 
 pany ? " 
 
 " I'm afraid because he despises it. I've 
 asked him half-a-dozen times to wine with 
 me, but he always makes excuses." 
 
 "There, you see! He knows his place. 
 He is aware that he has no business in your 
 society." 
 
 "He is right ! I feel your sarcasm. I 
 know I am not up to his mark." 
 
 " Now, my dear Attleborough, you must 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 161 
 
 feel sure that I alluded only to his condition 
 of life!" 
 
 " My good fellow, Cleve is continually at 
 John Howard's. Cleve is as fond of Howard 
 as Howard of him." 
 
 " Ah ! Lord John aspires only to the so- 
 ciety of book- worms ; Lord John is a regular 
 
 " A sap I am as proud to call cousin, as 
 you are of your uncle Sir William. Howard 
 will be one of the first men of the day ; never 
 perhaps so eminent as Cleve, because Howard 
 will distinguish himself practically, politi- 
 cally, among his contemporaries; and I've 
 a notion that the Fairford youth will be heard 
 of by posterity. Lord John offered before 
 me one day, to make Cleve his chaplain and 
 librarian at Howard Castle; and give him the 
 fine living of Coleby, if he chose to take 
 orders." 
 
 "Then he is going into the Church?" 
 " Not he ! Cleve honestly owned he was 
 
162 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 too much devoted to books to make a good 
 parish priest. Though never violent in his 
 opinions, I suspect he entertains as much 
 horror as / do of mercenary priestcraft." 
 
 Davenport's next attempt at sociability- 
 was directed to May -Fly, and Morgiana. 
 But the next time he encountered Cleve, the 
 scholar had all the benefit of a salute, such as 
 is due to the favourite of a duke. 
 
 His Grace of Attleborough, however, though 
 competent to appreciate the extraordinary 
 merits of Jervis Cleve, did not apprehend the 
 true motive which drew him into the society 
 of Lord John Howard. It was there the Fair- 
 ford youth found the only companion to whom 
 he had yet been tempted to concede the name 
 of friend. In the tutor of young Howard, he 
 had at once a monitor and an associate. 
 
 Though scarcely past his thirtieth year, 
 Philip Fairfax had been suggested to the 
 Marquis of Wrexhill as private tutor to his 
 second son, (a youth of remarkable promise, 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 163 
 
 and the heir of a large maternal property,) 
 as much for the steadiness of his moral con- 
 duct as for his university distinctions. Yet 
 Lord John, who on his first presentation to his 
 preceptor regarded him as a natural enemy, 
 the chartered foe to all pleasures and recrea- 
 tions, came to regard him in the course of the 
 first six months as a cheerful friend, without 
 any sacrifice of principle or propriety on the 
 part of the gentleman in black. 
 
 A more intimate acquaintance did but con- 
 firm a friendship honourable to both. For 
 once, a learned tutor was happy in an intelli- 
 gent pupil, the learned tutor being no pedant, 
 the intelligent pupil no prig. The leading 
 trait in Lord John Howard's character was 
 love of distinction ; and born possessed of rank 
 and fortune, political and literary ambition 
 afforded the sole outlet for this ruling passion. 
 Aware of his father's anxious desire to see 
 him launch into public life, the whole course 
 of his studies was directed towards the accom- 
 
164 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 plishment of Lord Wrexhill's expectations; 
 and the college-tutor having no immediate 
 relatives to assert a prior claim upon his 
 time, he had several times accompanied Lord 
 John to pass the vacation at Wrexhill Abbey 
 or Howard Castle, to prevent any intermission 
 in their studies. 
 
 These visits afforded to Philip Fairfax a 
 valuable insight into the ways of the world. 
 His experience was divided between the ob- 
 scure home of his early childhood, a musty 
 college, and a House of Lords! Undazzled, 
 however, by the glare of aristocratic life, he 
 exercised his sound judgment upon the attrac- 
 tive scene. He was neither struck blind by 
 the beauty of the noble syrens of the house of 
 Howard, who, concluding all scholars to be 
 poets, intreated the tutor to write verses in 
 their albums ; nor dumb by the apathetic stare 
 with which, as part of the family furniture, he 
 was regarded by their husbands and brothers. 
 And the unassuming self-possession with which 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 165 
 
 he maintained his ground as a gentleman, in 
 the society into which, by no desire of his own, 
 he had been summoned by his patron, ended 
 by insuring him the universal respect of all. 
 
 But the glimpses thus obtained, luckily dis- 
 enchanted his eyes from the spells created by 
 imagination, in her visionary portraiture of 
 the great world. 
 
 " Do not suppose," observed Fairfax to 
 young Cleve, when in one of their quiet 
 evening walks he described the brilliant fes- 
 tivities he had witnessed the preceding winter 
 at Wrexhill Abbey, " do not suppose that the 
 gorgeousness of these scenes has left an agree- 
 able impression on my mind. I depict them 
 for your amusement, as I conceive them to 
 have been seen by others." 
 
 " And why by others, rather than your- 
 self?" 
 
 " I am not a fair judge. People who go up 
 in a balloon, and are occupied with the uneasy 
 duty of maintaining their aerial position, have 
 
166 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 little leisure for admiring the beauty of the 
 prospect. They may poeticize when they 
 come down upon the glory of the unclouded 
 sun, or the extensive wonders of the developed 
 landscape; but, my word for it, all was lost 
 upon them, so long as their chief care was not 
 to break their necks by a sudden descent ! " 
 
 " But would you persuade me, Fairfax," 
 argued his young companion, " that your awe 
 of the society at Wrexhill Abbey, prevented 
 you from enjoying the pleasures of the place ?" 
 
 " Rather, perhaps, my consciousness of want 
 of awe ; my sense of feeling too much on a par 
 with those who marked their persuasion of 
 superiority by an unconcealable air of pa- 
 tronage." 
 
 " Impertinent ! " 
 
 " No ! there was no impertinence in the 
 case; nothing but good-humoured condescen- 
 sion, purporting to raise me to their level. 
 Had their notice been insolent, I should have 
 despised them. As it was, I only despised 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 167 
 
 myself, for entertaining as much reliance on 
 my personal merit, as they on the merits 
 of their ancestors. Both showed weakness ; 
 mine, perhaps, the least excusable." 
 
 "You make no distinction, then, between 
 justifiable self-esteem, and the fatuity of a 
 coxcomb ? " 
 
 " Who is to decide upon the justifiability of 
 self-esteem ? " 
 
 " The innate conscience and sense of recti- 
 tude which every man brings with him into 
 the world!" 
 
 " Pho pho! a blind guide an obscure 
 oracle ! All I learned at the abbey was that 
 the character of a parasite is the natural 
 growth of such a soil; and that no man of 
 honourable mind, having other means of sub- 
 sistence, should place himself in a noble family 
 on terms of dependence." 
 
 " Surely, if his position there be spe- 
 cific, it is his own fault if he do not 
 maintain it." 
 
168 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 " Experto crede not Eoberto, but Philip 
 Fairfax ! It is surprising in how many 
 specious ways one may be elbowed off, or 
 seduced off the pedestal, on which one is 
 predetermined to stand one's ground. We 
 are not, at the moment, conscious of our 
 dislodgment. It is only on reflection one 
 finds one has forfeited one's self-respect, and 
 the respect of others. Trust me, Cleve ! 
 Be a village curate, rather than a courtly 
 chaplain; be a country schoolmaster, rather 
 than bear-leader to a lord ! " 
 
 " Yet surely the society of the eminent 
 men to which you are thus introduced " 
 
 " May be bought at too high a price ! 
 A few hours' enjoyment of interesting and 
 improving conversation, does not repay the 
 insolence of servants and slights of their 
 masters. It is not once in a thousand in- 
 stances, that a man in my situation meets 
 with the consideration I have received from 
 the Howard family. Yet there have been 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 169 
 
 moments when I should have preferred being 
 employed to break stones on the King's 
 highway." 
 
 Nor was this the only point on which 
 the experience of Fairfax afforded a valuable 
 lesson to Jervis Cleve. 
 
 " All this is very well!" said he, after 
 witnessing the brilliant recitation of his 
 young friend's prize poem. " But do not 
 let such triumphs mislead you. Do not limit 
 your ambition to the barren honours of a 
 man of letters. It is a calling that will 
 perhaps give you bread perhaps immor- 
 tality ; but never suffice to place your name 
 in the list of benefactors to the human 
 race. There is little consolation at the close 
 of life in the consciousness of having created 
 an ode or an epic. I had rather have in- 
 vented a turnscrew, or improved the venti- 
 lation of a prison." 
 
 Such were the arguments which contro- 
 verted the favourite axioms of Peter Par- 
 
 VOL. I. I 
 
170 PEERS AXD PARVENUS. 
 
 menter, and confirmed the previous bent of 
 Cleve's inclinations. Auspicious as was the 
 career that lay open before him of university 
 preferment, his vagrant desires were not to 
 be controlled ; and, after taking high ho- 
 nours, he waited patiently for the falling in 
 of a travelling professorship, which, after 
 the most serious remonstrances on the part 
 of his superiors, was accorded him by ac- 
 clamation. 
 
 His preparations for leaving England were 
 eagerly hurried over. He felt that it was 
 his duty to visit Bilston ; and bitterly did 
 poor Cleve reproach himself that it was a 
 duty rather than a pleasure. Already a 
 small sum, realized as a contributor to 
 various scientific journals, had enabled him to 
 settle his father in comparative comfort. But 
 the old man clung< to his native village. He 
 preferred being tenant of an old grange named 
 Gkbestone, belonging to Madame Hecks- 
 worth, to better accommodations elsewhere : 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 171 
 
 and though a stirring servant lass prevented 
 all necessity for household labours on the part 
 of aunt Morris or her pretty niece, both 
 were too much habituated to work to be 
 happy in idleness. 
 
 Jervis soon recognized the impossibility of 
 making his father understand the bent of his 
 plans. Born in an inland county, Richard 
 Cleve could not so much as figure to himself 
 the nature of the great deep. He repeated 
 with childish iteration that " poor Jervy was 
 going to visit foreign parts." But foreign 
 parts conveyed to the old husbandman's 
 mind the impression of Scotland or Ireland, 
 as much as of a continental country. 
 
 It was not at Bilston, in short, that the 
 poor student was to find encouragement for 
 his projects, or sympathy in his success. 
 Neither aunt Morris nor Jenny saw cause 
 to rejoice in a plan that was to remove 
 from them the pride of their days. So long 
 
 as he remained a dweller in the land, they 
 
 12 
 
172 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 cherished hopes that he might live to achieve 
 the curacy of the parish. But who could 
 say what he might become, while wander- 
 ing away his youth amid the abominations of 
 Papists, and the wickedness of foreign parts? 
 They would almost rather have had him 
 adhere to weeding, with the certainty of 
 becoming head gardener at last! 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 173 
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
 If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is that he 
 keeps his at the same time. SWIFT. 
 
 ON the point of quitting England for 
 years, Jervis Cleve found to his regret that 
 it was expected he should go through the 
 ceremony of leave-taking at Bilston Hall. 
 Mrs Hecksworth had not yet visited the 
 new residence of the humble family so largely 
 indebted to her bounty. At the old cot- 
 tage she was in the habit of making fre- 
 quent calls ; but for the last six months 
 the Hecksworth family had been resident in 
 London, and it was only on the eve of 
 Cleve's visit they had returned to the Hall. 
 
 Business of considerable family importance 
 had detained them in town. On attempting 
 to prove the will of the late squire, it was 
 
174 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 discovered that the deed of entail, which, 
 if he had left a boy would have secured 
 the Bilston estate to his eldest son, secured 
 it also, failing male heirs, to his eldest 
 daughter. His laudable wish to divide his 
 property equally among his children was thus 
 frustrated ; and, saving Mrs Hecksworth's 
 claim of dowry, the lands and tenements of 
 Bilston were to devolve upon Lucy. 
 
 Of these particulars, rumour had given 
 only slight indications in the village. Jervis 
 was not at present aware that the damsel by 
 whose transmission of her mother's purse his 
 feelings had been so deeply wounded, was 
 now lady paramount at the Hall ; or that the 
 Miss Lucy whom his earliest recollections 
 portrayed as a smiling infant in arms, at the 
 time he was employed in sweeping up dry 
 leaves or the grass of the new-mown lawn, 
 was now a great lady; bearing a scutcheon of 
 pretence, and as many thousands a year as 
 entitled her to be called an heiress. Dame 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 175 
 
 Fortune, by whose caprices the ragged boy 
 had been transformed into the thriving 
 scholar, had lined with gold the pockets of 
 the lovely girl whose form and face were now 
 ripening into womanly beauty. 
 
 Fairer in the eyes of the spell-bound Cleve 
 than even her mother had ever been, his 
 heart thrilled within him as she directed a 
 few kindly words to the gifted parvenu, 
 who, for the first time, was offered a chair 
 in presence of Mrs Hecks worth of Bilston 
 Hall. 
 
 " You find your father comfortable, I hope, 
 Mr Cleve ? " demanded the squire's widow, 
 in a tone of patronage. "Your aunt, poor 
 woman, is getting sadly infirm. But it ap- 
 pears there is no longer a necessity for her 
 working so hard as formerly. You have only 
 one sister at home, I think?" 
 
 " Only one, madam." 
 
 " The others are in place, in London, I 
 fancy?" 
 
176 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 " The eldest is married to a tradesman ; 
 the second is no more." 
 
 "And your brothers? There was one, I re- 
 member, who turned out unfortunately. Have 
 you never had tidings of him? " 
 
 " None, madam." 
 
 " The others are in service?" 
 
 " In service, madam, and doing well." 
 
 " You were acquainted, I believe, at Cam- 
 bridge with a connexion of ours ? " said Lucy 
 Hecksworth, feeling for the embarrassment 
 of poor Cleve under the catechizing investi- 
 gations of her mother. " Davenport Mr 
 Herbert Davenport?" 
 
 " I was very slightly acquainted with him," 
 replied the embarrassed young man. 
 
 " We met him the other day on our way 
 from town, at my cousin Sir Eichard's, at the 
 Grange," continued Lucy ; " and he gave us a 
 highly flattering account of your college 
 achievements, without hinting that we should 
 see you here. Mr Davenport mentioned that 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 177 
 
 you were going on a visit to Lord Wrex- 
 hill." 
 
 " His lordship did me the honour to invite 
 me, but I declined the invitation." 
 
 " Quite right ! " observed Mrs Hecks worth, 
 more worldly-wise in her estimate of social 
 distinctions now than when a sentimental pale- 
 ness and a crop of raven hair had sufficed to 
 interest her in the destinies of a sickly gar- 
 dener's boy. " Nothing leads to mortification 
 and disappointment more surely, than dispro- 
 portionate connexions." 
 
 "But Mr Cleve, mamma, is the intimate 
 friend of Lord John Howard, the son of Lord 
 Wrexhill." 
 
 " The intimate friend of his lordship's 
 tutor, Mr Fairfax," amended Cleve, with 
 haughty bitterness. "Lord John Howard 
 honours me with his notice" 
 
 " I am .happy to find that you discriminate 
 so judiciously," observed Mrs Hecksworth, 
 with some dignity. 
 
 i3 
 
178 PEERS AND PAE VENUS. 
 
 "And Jam surprised to find that Mr Cleve 
 creates a distinction where it is not made by 
 others. Herbert Davenport (the constant 
 associate of the Duke of Attleborough, a 
 cousin of Lord John), assured me that Lord 
 John Howard had not a friend he regarded 
 more dearly." 
 
 " What do you think of our improve- 
 ments ? " abruptly demanded the lady-mother, 
 eager to change the conversation, which was 
 taking a critical turn. " Don't you find the 
 lawn vastly improved by the removal of that 
 high laurel hedge which used to shut out the 
 evening sun? " 
 
 Lucy Hecksworth looked vexed, and Cleve 
 coloured as deeply as his sallow complexion 
 would admit. All this sounded to both of 
 them so like "Admire how we have improved 
 our family place, since you used to weed in 
 the garden ! " 
 
 After a few words in reply, he rose there- 
 fore to take a respectful leave. It was impos- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 179 
 
 sible for him to forget that the domineering 
 squire's widow, by whom he was despised as 
 a parvenu, was the identical creature who, 
 in her kindlier youth, had extended a hand 
 of compassion to his miseries. 
 
 But though it was impossible to be less 
 than grateful, it was impossible to be more ! 
 
 On every side, indeed, his feelings were tor- 
 tured at Bilston. He was as much a stranger 
 in his father's house, as in that of the squire. 
 The poor half-doting man stood in awe of his 
 own child ; and even his sister, as they strolled 
 together through the old coppice, marking the 
 same effects of the same evening sun on the 
 hoary trunks of the same old beech trees, or 
 stood watching near a secluded foot-bridge 
 over the brook, where its course was ob- 
 structed by the clustered alder bushes which 
 formed a shelter for the kingfisher hovering 
 over beds of blue forget-me-nots, so bright of 
 hue that they looked like feathers shed from 
 its breast, even Jane, even Jenny, did 
 
180 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 not unfold her thoughts to him as formerly. 
 She fancied her girlish remarks too trivial to 
 be offered to so great a scholar. Unconscious 
 of the unwritten poetry contained in her art- 
 less mind, she knew not how eagerly Jervis 
 was watching for her simple words, as indica- 
 tions of the purest spirit of womanliness, the 
 only angelic influence left on earth. 
 
 Of his own prospects, indeed, she said 
 much : of herself, nothing ! It was all 
 question, all interrogation. She felt that 
 nothing she could have to reveal had any 
 further right to interest her refined and over- 
 educated brother. 
 
 " I see how it is ! " communed Jervis 
 with himself, as, on the return of his sister 
 to her household affairs, he pursued his 
 evening saunter alone through those furzy 
 thickets of hazel and maple in which, when 
 roaming in his melancholy childhood, he 
 had been accustomed to form such glorious 
 visions, visions how far beyond even the 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 181 
 
 brightest realization of human life ! " I am 
 now alone. I have lost my family. I have 
 lost my happy household intimacies. I 
 have renounced every better tie of the heart. 
 I am in a false position; and all that is 
 unnatural begets misery and regret." 
 
 But to these nervous misgivings, to which 
 genius is on some account or other peculiarly 
 susceptible, genius brought its consolations, 
 like balm flowing from the wounds of some 
 Indian tree. He was forced to admit that 
 his gains exceeded his losses ; that he had 
 not only obtained in expansion of mind more 
 than he had forfeited by contraction of the 
 affections, but secured the means of solacing 
 the old age of his father. His present mor- 
 bid state of feeling sometimes prompted him, 
 indeed, to inquire whether even his father 
 was not happier in his old cottage, surrounded 
 by the homely objects long familiar to his 
 eyes, than amid the unnatural comforts forced 
 upon him. But it was impossible to pursue 
 
182 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 these fastidious arguments. His infirm kins- 
 woman and gentle sister were redeemed from 
 necessity for the hard labours which formerly 
 had worn away their lives; and he was 
 forced to admit that his preferment was al- 
 ready bringing forth good fruit. 
 
 This unsettled state of mind was, in fact, 
 natural to his years. The mere consciousness 
 of power does not suffice to elevate. As yet, 
 he had given only indications of genius still 
 to be realized. Time was wanting to satisfy 
 the world that his acquirements were to place 
 a new planet in the sphere of immortality, 
 rather than dazzle it with the coruscations 
 of a useless meteor. Time was wanting 
 to convince the great that the peasant boy 
 was an aristocrat of nature's creation; or 
 even to certify to those who loved him and 
 founded strong expectations on his future 
 excellence, that the simplicity of his charac- 
 ter was not mere inexperience of the world; 
 but that virtue as surely pre-existed there 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 183 
 
 as the oak in the acorn. For time is indis- 
 pensable to confirm the patent of all who 
 aspire to honours beyond their sphere. 
 
 The boyish impertinence of a Herbert Daven- 
 port, or the empty hauteur of a Mrs Hecks- 
 worth, had made it apparent to Jervis Cleve 
 that the splendour of his launch would avail 
 nothing to keep him buoyant on the waters ; 
 that it was by his own exertions he must be 
 preserved from wreck ; that the sanctuary 
 erected by other hands must be 
 
 By its own weight 
 Made stedfast and immovable. 
 
 But if the responsibility of his future for- 
 tunes devolved wholly on himself, it was not 
 a responsibility greater than he could bear. 
 Often did he repeat to himself the striking 
 exhortation of Siegfried Mahlmann, dwell- 
 ing on every line as though it conveyed a 
 spirit-stirring lesson to his soul. 
 
 When the gloom is deepest round thee, 
 When the bonds of grief have bound thee, 
 And in loneliness and sorrow 
 By the poisoned springs of life 
 
184 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 Thou sittest, yearning for a morrow 
 That will free thee from the strife ; 
 
 Look not upwards, for above thee 
 Neither sun, nor star is gleaming ; 
 Look not round for some to love thee ; 
 Put not faith in mortal seeming ; 
 Lightly would they hold and leave thee. 
 Man and woman would deceive thee. 
 
 But in the depths of thine own soul 
 Descend, and mightier powers unroll 
 Energies that long have slumbered 
 In its trackless depths unnumbered. 
 Speak the word ! the power divinest 
 Will awake, if thou inclinest. 
 
 Thou art lord in thine own kingdom j 
 Rule thyself thou rulest all ! 
 Smile, when Fortune's proud dominion 
 Roughly touched shall rudely fall. 
 Be true unto thyself, and hear not 
 Evil thoughts, that would enslave thee. 
 GOD is in thee ! Mortal, fear not ; 
 Trust in Him, and he will save thee ! * 
 
 One last trial, however, still awaited him 
 in England. If gratitude had forced him 
 into the presence of the Squiress of Bilston, 
 gratitude could not fail to conduct him across 
 the weedy court-yard of Fairford College. 
 
 " My dear boy, my dear child, my 
 
 * Translated by a young lady. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 185 
 
 dear Cleve ! " said or rather sobbed his old 
 preceptor, when, at the close of his daily 
 labours, he found his favourite scholar seated 
 in his gloomy chamber of dais, awaiting his re- 
 lease, " I was afraid you had forgotten me !" 
 
 " Never ! " replied Cleve, clasping the old 
 man's withered hands, and noting with grief 
 the change in his appearance, intimating a 
 sudden break-up of the constitution, such as 
 often awaits those who attain without illness 
 a green old age. " I was here, you know, at 
 Christmas, on my way back to Cambridge." 
 
 " Ay, ay ? was it no longer ago than Christ- 
 mas ? Only six months ? Time seems to 
 hang heavier, my dear Jervis, as we live longer 
 in the world. The momentum is exhausted ; 
 the machine flags in its action. I'm not so 
 young as I was not so able for exertion." 
 
 " I fear you have been indisposed, sir?" 
 said Cleve, in a voice of affectionate interest. 
 
 "No, not ill \". ld only old! And 
 when one grows old, one hankers after rest. 
 
186 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 My duty is sometimes irksome to me now. I 
 should be glad to enjoy a doze on a summer's 
 afternoon in my easy chair, instead of the end- 
 less labour of tuition. Teaching grows tedious, 
 my dear boy, after fifty-five years of unre- 
 mitting practice. I want rest I want rest ! " 
 
 " And why not retire then, sir, and enjoy 
 your remaining days in quiet ? " inquired 
 his former pupil. 
 
 " Ah ! Jervis ! if you would but have 
 made up your mind to take orders and succeed 
 me in my post ! For now-a-days, these master- 
 ships are only given to divines, and I fear 
 if you were to become a candidate " 
 
 " I am not so ambitious ! " replied Cleve, 
 with a smile. " I have not your worth and 
 temper to render me fit for such a post, or such 
 a post for me. Fifty-five years of tuition ! " 
 
 " It is not, however, solicitude touching my 
 successor that keeps me here," replied the 
 old man, having summoned the still older 
 woman who officiated as his handmaiden to 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 187 
 
 bring the trivet and tea-kettle for the only 
 
 meal his experience enabled him to regard as 
 
 sociable. " But I want means to retire with 
 
 decency. Frugally as I have lived, I thank 
 
 God that my heart has not been hard enough 
 
 to lay by aught worth speaking of, out of my 
 
 small stipend. Somehow or other, I never 
 
 looked forward to this time. I knew that 
 
 while zealous in the discharge of my duties, the 
 
 Board would not remove me; I forgot that I 
 
 was under the control of a master mightier 
 
 than the Board. I forgot that I might grow 
 
 old, infirm, and weary. I thought peace was 
 
 for another world. I did not anticipate that 
 
 I should ever yearn after it here!" 
 
 The tenderest compassion arose in the mind 
 of the pupil as he listened to these words. 
 But his next impulse was a feeling of self- 
 gratulation that by his means the old man, his 
 father, had been secured from such a crisis, 
 and might go down in quietness to the grave. 
 " Still, I think I might make shift to get 
 
188 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 on for my few remaining years (at three- 
 score and twelve, my dear Jervis, no need to 
 lay in any wondrous provision for the fu- 
 ture!) if the governors could be induced to 
 grant me a small retiring pension." 
 
 "Induced? they could not refuse so well- 
 merited a concession ! " cried Cleve. 
 
 " I don't know. The mayor of Fairford is 
 the only one of them who troubles himself 
 with the administration of the affairs of the 
 college. The treasurer, you know, is ap- 
 pointed by the corporation, and both mayor 
 and treasurer have shown themselves ini- 
 mical to my interests. I have not chosen 
 to connive at much that I considered objec- 
 tionable in their arrangements." 
 
 " Still, so just a claim ! " 
 
 "It is not always by their justice claims 
 are recognized in this world. But I have 
 hopes, Jervis, my son, hopes through you." 
 
 " Through me ? Do you suppose that the 
 mayor of Fairford would be influenced by one 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 189 
 
 so obscure as myself, when merit and re- 
 verend age say nothing in your behalf ? " 
 
 " I allude not to the mayor, but to his 
 enemy and antagonist, Sir Richard Davenport 
 (the son of your old patron, who succeeded 
 last year to his property). Sir Richard, an 
 hereditary governor of the college, has in- 
 terested himself of late in its administration ; 
 some say out of animosity to Mr Goswell, 
 some say out of pure and conscientious 
 zeal. He attends every monthly meeting; 
 and a proposition from Mm to the Board 
 would do my business." 
 
 " But how can I serve you, my dear Mr 
 Parmenter?" cried Jervis. "I am not in 
 the slightest degree acquainted with Sir 
 Richard Davenport." 
 
 " As his father's protege, as a protege 
 who has done so much honour to his father, 
 I should imagine that " 
 
 "The only personal slight I received at 
 the university," interrupted Jervis, "was 
 
190 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 offered me by one of the members of the Da- 
 venport family, and expressly on the ground 
 that I was the mere protege of Sir William." 
 
 "If it would be any personal annoyance 
 to you to interfere, my dear boy," observed 
 the old man humbly, " don't speak of it again 
 give not a thought more to the subject ! 
 God forbid that I should be the means of 
 drawing mortification on your young head." 
 
 " On the contrary, if you have the slightest 
 grounds for imagining that Sir Eichard Da- 
 venport would listen more readily to my 
 statement of your wishes and claims than to 
 your own, say the word, dear sir, and I will 
 proceed this very evening to the Grange." 
 
 " I do think so, that is, I did think so," 
 answered poor Peter, in a desponding voice. 
 And there was something in his artless de- 
 crepitude so touching, something so pitiful in 
 the aspect of the man who had devoted his 
 whole life long to be the companion of boys, 
 and was returning to second childhood with- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 191 
 
 out earning more by his self-sacrifice than 
 scanty daily bread, that Jervis determined at 
 all risks to make an effort which might benefit 
 his benefactor, and could yield mortification 
 only to himself. 
 
 It was not without misgivings, however, 
 that he proceeded to the Grange, and in the 
 cool of the evening, staff in hand, traversed 
 the noble park. Of Davenport's nature he 
 augured little good. He had practical expe- 
 rience of the coldness of Mrs Hecksworth, and 
 the flippant personality of Herbert. The late 
 Sir William he knew only as his benefactor; 
 a country baronet whose life had been de- 
 voted to making the most of his land, and the 
 least of his tenants. With his successor, he 
 had still to make acquaintance. 
 
 Happily, his ignorance of the ceremonies of 
 life served to procure him the audience he 
 sought. A stranger would not at that hour 
 have obtained admittance. But the irregular 
 mode of Cleve's approach across the park 
 
192 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 happened to catch the eye of the party as- 
 sembled in the drawing-room; and inquiry 
 having determined that the handsome pedes- 
 trian was no other than the famous Fairford 
 youth, he was instantly brought forward, with 
 the view of making sport for the Philistines. 
 
 Had Jervis Cleve proved to be a clumsy 
 rustic, Sir Eichard Davenport might perhaps 
 have regarded him with the good-humoured 
 superiority testified by some high-bred hound 
 to a cotter's cur. But his fashionable mother 
 and sisters, and a few dandies who were visit- 
 ing the Grange in their train, were evidently 
 so much startled by the appearance and ad- 
 dress of the parvenu, nay, so many admiring 
 glances were directed towards his fine intellec- 
 tual countenance, that Sir Eichard felt it in- 
 cumbent on him to resume his natural inso- 
 lence. Jervis was worth disliking, worth 
 insulting. Jervis was possessed of personal 
 endowments producing rivalship with his 
 own. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 193 
 
 Nor was the task of insult difficult, even 
 without the forfeiture of his own dignity. 
 Sir Richard could assume, at will, a hard, dry, 
 stony look of superiority, animated only by a 
 covert sneer more bitter than any uttered 
 bitterness; and on being requested by Cleve 
 to grant him the favour of a few minutes' 
 private interview, his look was so repellently 
 contemptuous, that it needed all the disin- 
 terested motives and energetic warmth of 
 Peter Parmenter's advocate, to encourage him 
 in his benevolent errand. 
 
 While in a few brief but striking sen- 
 tences he made his appeal, Sir Eichard's 
 eyes were fixed on the carpet; nor did he 
 vouchsafe a word in reply. To animate a 
 cold auditor is the most dispiriting of tasks; 
 and Cleve, fancying from this utter silence 
 that he was not understood, proceeded to 
 recapitulate his arguments and renew his 
 petition. 
 
 " I perfectly apprehended your meaning in 
 
 VOL. I. K 
 
194 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 the first instance/' said Sir Richard at 
 length, with curling lip and measured tone. 
 "I was only at a loss to conceive, sir, 
 what motive could have determined you to 
 apply to me, with whom you have no per- 
 sonal acquaintance or connexion, instead of 
 allowing the interests of this worthy old 
 gentleman, the Fairford schoolmaster, to be 
 placed in the regular course, under the 
 consideration of the Board of Governors of 
 Fairford College?" 
 
 Cleve was chilled to the soul. But he 
 had self-possession to reply that Mr Par- 
 naenter himself entertained a hope of find- 
 ing his pretensions more favourably con- 
 sidered by a scholar and a gentleman, than 
 by the corporation of a manufacturing town. 
 
 The Fairford youth perhaps intended to 
 recal Sir Richard Davenport, by this allu- 
 sion to his social position, to a sense of 
 how ill he was fulfilling his duties in either 
 capacity, Nor was the reproof thrown away. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 195 
 
 A premeditated sarcasm stood suspended on 
 the lips of his auditor. 
 
 " This poor old man feels that the sands 
 remaining in his glass, are numbered," pur- 
 sued Jervis. 
 
 "I beg your pardon?" demanded Sir 
 Eichard, as if apologizing for not understand- 
 ing the metaphor. 
 
 " Mr Parmenter is so old a man," re- 
 sumed Cleve, disappointing his malicious an- 
 tagonist by remaining unperturbed, " that 
 patience would be henceforth a weakness 
 rather than a virtue. He must either re- 
 ceive immediate relief, or will receive it too 
 late." 
 
 " I am not aware in what light the Board 
 may be prepared to view a petition urged in 
 so peremptory a manner," said Sir Richard, 
 haughtily. 
 
 " If any fault of respect be perceptible, 
 sir, in my mode of urging it," said Jervis 
 
 K2 
 
196 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 Cleve, suppressing, for the old man's sake, 
 his rising indignation, "be not the penalty 
 visited upon one who is little able to bear 
 up against severity. This man, although a 
 scholar whose endowments might put the 
 most eminent to shame, is poor, sick, old, 
 and humble. Judge whether his remaining 
 days ought to be embittered by harshness, 
 however much I may have erred in tres- 
 passing upon the politeness of Sir Eichard 
 Davenport." 
 
 By the movement of the hat he held in 
 his hand, the young man indicated that he 
 was departing. For the audience had not 
 been a sitting one ; and Sir Eichard had no 
 further mode of testifying his impertinence, 
 nor any opportunity of redeeming it. Al- 
 most before he had time to ring the bell, 
 Cleve was out of the room, out of the 
 house. He was gone before the Inquisitive 
 group which had been watching his colloquy 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 197 
 
 with the baronet from the further extremity 
 of the drawing-room, suspected that they 
 were to see no more of him ; and Daven- 
 port's reply to their inquiries concerning the 
 object of his visit, " Oh ! charity for his 
 old schoolmaster, or some such trash ! " was 
 answered in its turn by eager offers of a 
 subscription on the part of the pretty triflers, 
 on whom the mournful brow and expressive 
 voice of the young scholar had made so 
 favourable an impression. 
 
 Such was the result of Cleve's first effort 
 in diplomacy ! And though the success of the 
 memorial he drew up that night on quitting 
 the Grange (which was the means of deter- 
 mining the Board of Governors to accord a 
 liberal pension to the superannuated Par- 
 menter, as well as an asylum for life in the 
 college whose mastership he immediately 
 abdicated) was a source of sincere happiness 
 to him, it could not heal tlfe wounds so 
 
198 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 gratuitously inflicted on his pride by Sir 
 Eichard Davenport. These remained smart- 
 ing! 
 
 His last impression of his native country 
 was darkened by the hauteur of his patroness, 
 and the insolence of her nephew. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 199 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 More solid things do not show so well the complexion of the 
 times, as ballads and libels. SELDBN. 
 
 THE Clutterbucks of Portland place were 
 average specimens of the class to which mo- 
 dern parlance has assigned the name of the 
 aristocracy of wealth ; a class of the com- </ 
 munity which, in the second generation, may 
 produce pho3nixes ; but which, in the first, is 
 more prolific in jays addicted to fine feathers 
 and prodigious chattering! 
 
 For people must be educated before they 
 can educate ; and the upstart millionaires, 
 still in the first gloss of their electro-typic 
 gilding, have their lesson to learn. 
 
 Caroline and Emma Clutterbuck were t 
 showy -looking girls, reared in the enjoyment 
 
200 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 and acquirement of everything that can be 
 had, or known, for money. 
 
 Devoid of the natural good breeding which 
 is the growth of good nature, and imperfectly 
 versed in the forms of etiquette inculcated as a 
 lesson by the governess, their beauty wanted 
 attraction, and their manners polish. Co- 
 heiresses to three hundred thousand pounds, 
 they had been crammed with accomplishments 
 in proportion to their fortunes ; and on emerg- 
 ing from school-room seclusion into the glare 
 of society, by a transition as instantaneous as 
 that which ignites a gas-lamp, they were re- 
 quired to study as elaborately the mysteries 
 of dress and fashion, as formerly the sonatas 
 of Thalberg, or the German grammar. Their 
 ambitious mother had set her heart upon 
 their renewing the alliance of the Corbet 
 family with the peerage. 
 
 Both sisters were now reigning beauties in 
 the showy ballrooms of their father's scrip 
 and omnium connexion; and attracted the 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 201 
 
 utmost admiration in the neighbourhood of 
 the villa which he called his country seat, 
 fifteen miles from Hyde-park corner; and 
 while old Clutterbuck affected the bluff country 
 gentleman, and presumed upon his hundred 
 and fifty acres to offer hunting, shooting, and 
 fishing, to all his friends, and parade about 
 his farms and bailiffs to all his acquaint- 
 ance, in as high a tone as any estated magnate 
 of the three ridings of Yorkshire, his 'daugh- 
 ters were the pride of the ostentatious din- 
 ner parties of the dinner-giving county of 
 Surrey, led off its balls, and reduced its 
 duodecimo squirearchy to despair. They could 
 not forget that they had lords and ladies for 
 cousins; and evidently valued their fortune 
 chiefly as the means of purchasing similar 
 distinctions. 
 
 But after sitting enthroned as the divini- 
 ties of Leatherhead, Dorking, Carshalton, and 
 Epsom, it was mortifying enough to sink into 
 mere mortals on their annual migration to 
 
202 PEEKS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 Portland place. In London, they were no- 
 thing. In London, they were only the Miss 
 Clutterbucks, or rather " those" Miss Clutter- 
 bucks, who passed for " lions," from ap- 
 pearing over-dressed in a showy box at the 
 opera, or over-dressed in a showy carriage in 
 the park. 
 
 Unconscious that what was considered the 
 utmost brilliancy of fashion in their own set 
 was the cause of their exclusion from the 
 real beau monde, they attributed the difficulty 
 they experienced in getting into the circles 
 which were the object of their ambition, to 
 their plebeian patronymic ; and regarded it 
 in consequence with as much abhorrence as 
 the galley slave his ignominious mark. 
 
 Their hope of better things lay in the 
 Joddrell connexion; and such was the motive 
 of their idolatry of their cousin George. 
 
 Through him they still trusted to attain 
 their end. At all events, it was refreshing 
 to hear him babble the small-talk of his fash- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 203 
 
 ionable associates; and for three weeks after 
 each of his visits to Portland place, the Miss 
 Clutterbucks became insupportable to their 
 associates from their absurd airs of second- 
 hand impertinence. 
 
 So long as Lady Hillingdon had resided at 
 Brighton, she too had been brought into play, 
 as the highest honour in their hand. 
 When they talked of u my aunt Lady Hilling- 
 don," or "my cousins the Joddrells," the 
 Marylebonians, measuring the tenderness of 
 the Corbet race by their own strong family 
 affections, sympathized sincerely with the re- 
 grets professed by Mrs Clutterbuck that Lady 
 Hillingdon was not oftener a resident in town, 
 and doubted not that the correspondence be- 
 tween the sisters was warm and frequent. 
 
 The translation of the Hillingdons to town 
 was, therefore, a loss rather than a gain. For 
 beyond returning the visit of her sister, it was 
 clear that her ladyship intended to have nothing 
 to say to them; and the Clutterbucks, con- 
 
204 PEERS AND PARVEXUS. 
 
 scious of certain projects they had entertained, 
 and apprehending the Hillingdons might be 
 aware of the deliberate aim they had taken at 
 George, stood reproved rather than indignant, 
 at this want of sisterly cordiality. 
 
 It happened that, previous to the ratifica- 
 tion of the ruinous treaty between Joddrell 
 and his father, George, after leaving college, 
 had found himself in London before the com- 
 mencement of the gay season, without money 
 and without friends; where the undisguised 
 nonchalance of his fashionable associates im- 
 parted some value to the attentions with which 
 he was loaded in Portland place. 
 
 There was a daily cover for him at the table 
 of the Clutterbucks, a seat in their boxes at 
 the theatres, nay, a horse was expressly sent 
 for from Shrub's Hill for v his use. At first, 
 indeed, the head of the family was vio- 
 lently opposed to these excessive demonstra- 
 tions. But old C., who seemed to keep his 
 good sense for the City, and his good humour 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 205 
 
 for the West End, was soon laughed over by the 
 audacious cleverness with which his nephew 
 enlivened their humdrum family circle; more 
 especially when it became apparent not only 
 that his favourite Car. lent an idolizing ear to 
 the gay intruder, but that the gay intruder 
 devoted an admiring eye to his pretty cousin. 
 It was difficult, indeed, to be ungracious 
 towards one whose presence conferred so much 
 happiness upon the family; and George was 
 accordingly seen riding with his cousins, four 
 days out of the seven, and dining with them 
 those four, and the three remaining. 
 
 When questioned by a stray fine gentleman 
 or two concerning his fair companions, it was 
 easy to give a vague reply, implying nothing, 
 or certainly nothing creditable to the parties. 
 But it was less easy to evade the inquiries that 
 soon poured in upon him from his mother. 
 
 Harriet Corbet, the sister of Lady Hilling- 
 don and Mrs Clutterbuck, a disappointed and 
 envious old maid, had considered it her duty 
 
206 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 to despatch a hint to Brighton concerning what 
 was going on; and, though nothing but a 
 mother's partiality could for a moment have 
 imagined the knowing George Joddrell likely 
 to be taken in, the ladymother experienced, 
 or affected, as much uneasiness as though her 
 son had not been encrusted with worldliness 
 by a public school and the university; 
 seats of polite learning, where everything but 
 learning is to be learned. 
 
 When accused by his mother, on her arrival 
 in town, of having been made a dupe by the 
 family in Portland place, George would have 
 laughed outright, but that he judged it more 
 amusing to mystify Lady Hillingdon by an 
 evasive answer. He knew that, having now 
 established himself in a comfortable home, he 
 should enter no more the hospitable doors of 
 his adoring aunt. But it would have been too 
 great a condescension to set his mother's heart 
 at ease by the explanation. 
 
 He contented himself, therefore, with a 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 207 
 
 sardonic smile, which might be accepted as 
 assent, dissent, or anything else she pleased. 
 
 Finding that to extract an answer from 
 George by direct inquiry was out of the 
 question, she had recourse to other modes of 
 obtaining information, by bribing his valet, 
 examining his letters, and cross-examining 
 his tiger ; and having satisfied herself that, 
 although letters came from Portland place to 
 Hill street, none proceeded from Hill street to 
 Portland place, that servants in stone blue 
 and scarlet liveries brought missives to Mr 
 Joddrell, but that no answer was conveyed by 
 Mr Joddrell's modest undress of pepper and 
 salt, the only point still to be ascertained was 
 whether the young gentleman's daily pilgrim- 
 ages on his favourite hack, unattended by a 
 gossipping groom or tell-tale tiger, were 
 directed towards the fatal neighbourhood. 
 
 Meanwhile, Caroline Clutterbuck was the 
 unpitied victim of all parties. It seemed to 
 escape the attention of her mother that the 
 
208 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 poor girl was endowed with the susceptibility 
 of her age ; and that the attentions of a 
 showy, lively young man, to which she had 
 been exposed as a matter of speculation, 
 might make an indelible impression. Her 
 cousin, though estimated after the Corbet 
 fashion by Mrs Clutterbuck, simply as the 
 only son to Lord Hillingdon, was to Caroline 
 a hero of a romance ; and great was her 
 affection for the clever, handsome cousin, 
 who, on his part, loved only himself. 
 
 Though unprepared for the total desertion 
 of their favourite, the Clutterbucks could not 
 blind themselves to the fact that, from the 
 period of his mother's arrival, he visited 
 them rarely ; never except after repeated 
 entreaties; and that when he came at last, 
 his manner was cold and constrained. 
 
 But all this they attributed to the influence 
 of his family. It was impossible that George 
 could be in fault. He was misled by his 
 mother's folly. He was incited by his father 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 209 
 
 to form a more aristocratic connexion. 
 George must be altogether blameless ; nay, 
 was perhaps as much annoyed as themselves. 
 
 Every day poor Caroline, in her most showy 
 morning costume, and with her hair arranged 
 with scrupulous elegance, sat by the window 
 in Portland place, fancying that every ap- 
 proaching horse, cabriolet, or phaeton, was 
 to bring back the truant. At the opera, the 
 key of the boxkeeper creaking in the lock 
 brought a flush into her pale cheeks ; and in 
 the park, her eyes were eagerly bent upon the 
 dandy throng, in the hopes of discovering 
 the victim of parental tyranny on the watch 
 to hail her approach. But all in vain! 
 They never met. Their orbits were far apart. 
 Caroline's happiness was destroyed, her health 
 breaking. Yet George Joddrell was not likely 
 even to hear of her indisposition ! 
 
 Little did she surmise that tidings of the 
 illness of his bay mare would have excited 
 far more poignant emotions in his bosom ! 
 
210 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 Had the mother of the suffering girl sur- 
 mised for a moment the real state of affairs, 
 she would not have submitted without re- 
 monstrance. But Mrs Clutterbuck, accus- 
 tomed to the adulation awaiting those who 
 are rich enough to purchase flattery and not 
 nice in the quality of their purchase, could 
 not conceive that a child of hers, a beauty 
 and an heiress, should be so utterly slighted ; 
 and having made up her mind that George's 
 attachment would eventually break through 
 the restraints imposed by his unfeeling 
 parents, she waited patiently, and preached 
 patience to her daughter. 
 
 Affairs in Hill street proceeded, meanwhile, 
 as smoothly as if all had been solid beneath 
 the ice on which the Joddrells were skaiting 
 with so much dexterity. Lord Hillingdon 
 once more gave dinners to his brethren of the 
 turf, and Lady Hillingdon to the elderly 
 roues, the boon companions of Lord Charles; 
 both the lord and lady protesting to them- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 211 
 
 selves and each other, that these entertain- 
 ments were intended solely for the recrea- 
 tion of their offspring. 
 
 Had Mary and Agatha been aware of 
 either the real or pretended views of their 
 parents in thus opening their house, a 
 painful consciousness would have hung over 
 them, deteriorating all their efforts at hos- 
 pitality. But they were neither doers nor 
 thinkers of evil ; and excited by the bril- 
 liancy of the scene around them, were all 
 grace and good humour, as well as goodness 
 and truth. 
 
 " How could you support that odious 
 Lady Dash wood last night?" exclaimed 
 their brother, on the morning following 
 one of the formal dinner parties in Hill 
 street. " The woman is tiresome enough when 
 she talks; but when she sings, (poor old 
 greyheaded nightingale!) it is impossible to 
 keep one's countenance." 
 
 " Papa desires us to show every attention 
 
212 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 to Sir Robert and Lady Dash wood," said 
 Agatha, in an extenuating voice ; " and 
 it would be cruel to exercise much severity 
 of criticism on one who takes such pains 
 to amuse us. It cannot be for her own 
 pleasure she undertakes what is evidently a 
 painful effort." 
 
 " So! an epigram from the demure Miss 
 Agatha Joddrell ! You are improving, child, 
 you are improving ! " cried George. " Be- 
 fore the season is over, I dare say you will 
 grow quite as mordante as your neigh- 
 bours. " 
 
 " Remember that we live next door to 
 your friends the Micklethwaites," retorted 
 Agatha, laughing ; " it would surely be diffi- 
 cult to rival them ! " 
 
 " Again?" cried her brother. " You must 
 have eaten too much pine yesterday, and risen 
 with an indigestion. But look to your com- 
 plexions, young ladies ! Our party of to-mor- 
 row will be very different from that of yester- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 213 
 
 day : Dick Davenport and his cousin Herbert, 
 the Duke of Attleborough, John Howard, and 
 half-a-dozen others, the least of whom is 
 called a great match. Your preferment, mes de- 
 moiselles mes sceurs, lies before you. Why do 
 you look at Mary, sweet Miss Agatha, yet 
 with a countenance showing neither wonder 
 nor delight?" 
 
 " It means to express interrogation. I 
 want Mary to tell me whether I dare ask you 
 a favour ? " 
 
 " I should imagine there was no great occa- 
 sion for that inquiry," replied George, good- 
 humouredly ; and being as fond of his sisters 
 as his unloving nature would allow, he really 
 meditated compliance with Agatha's request, 
 provided it conveyed no possible inconvenience 
 to his personal comfort. 
 
 " It would give us so much pleasure, my 
 dear George, if you would invite Mrs 
 Fairfax's son to dinner!" resumed Agatha. 
 " We have no power or possibility of 
 
214 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 marking our gratitude for all her care 
 and kindness." 
 
 " And you therefore wish me to take upon 
 myself, towards Lord and Lady Hillingdon, the 
 odium of having introduced to their dinner 
 table some overgrown booby of a school- 
 boy?" cried her brother. " Thank you, thank 
 you." 
 
 " Mr Fairfax is on such friendly terms 
 with Lord John Howard, and so frequent a 
 guest at Lord WrexhilFs and the Duke of 
 Attleborough's, that I fancied the opportunity 
 a good one." 
 
 " You don't mean that your Mr Fairfax is 
 Lord John's bore of a tutor?" exclaimed 
 George : " a solemn prig, whom he used to 
 introduce by way of kill-joy or memento mori 
 into his Cambridge parties ! If Howard had 
 not been the best fellow in the world, he 
 would have been sent to Coventry for the 
 attempt." 
 
 " We know nothing of Mr Fairfax. I am 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 215 
 
 not sure that I should recognize him were 
 we to meet," rejoined Agatha. "But we have 
 heard the highest character of him. It is 
 but natural poor Mrs Fairfax should be proud 
 of her son. It was to provide for his educa- 
 tion that, she undertook the charge of 
 
 ours." 
 
 "Yes! and according to my mother's ac- 
 count, a pretty potage she has made of it ! 
 However, I have nothing to say against her 
 on that account. / am indulgent enough to 
 be satisfied with you. I look upon you as two 
 of the most unaccomplished girls about town, 
 and cherish you accordingly. Heavenly pow- 
 ers! to hear those Clutterbucks hammering 
 away at their concertos ! " 
 
 u The Clutterbucks? You know them, then? 
 You are intimate with our cousins? Now do 
 tell us " 
 
 " Nonsense ! I know very little of the 
 family, and intend that little to be less. But 
 about this Mr Fairfax of yours." 
 
216 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 " You mean this Mr Fairfax of Lord John 
 Howard's" 
 
 " Write a card for him, in proper form, for 
 to-morrow's dinner." 
 
 " Before you speak to papa and mamma?" 
 
 " Lord and Lady Hillingdon request the 
 honour, and so forth, and one of my fellows 
 shall leave it," added George, without ho- 
 nouring her interruption with the slightest 
 notice. 
 
 "But if my father and mother should 
 disapprove?" remonstrated the prudent 
 Agatha. 
 
 " The party on Friday is mine. I invite 
 whom I please. I am not responsible to the 
 governor." 
 
 " But mamma so particularly dislikes Mrs 
 Fairfax!" 
 
 " She does not care a straw about Mrs 
 Fairfax. She detested her daughters' gover- 
 ness, as most mammas do. But Mrs Fairfax 
 is your governess no longer, and Philip Fairfax 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 217 
 
 never was my tutor; so scribble your card 
 and have done with it." 
 
 " This is very kind of you," said Mary, 
 with glowing cheeks. 
 
 " You have not the slightest idea what an 
 invaluable friend she was to us," exclaimed 
 Agatha, pen in hand. 
 
 "I assure you, my dearest George, your 
 acquiescence is an act of real kindness to us." 
 " To you ? The devil a bit ! I intend it 
 as a civility to Lord John," replied their 
 amiable brother. "Howard, who is ridicu- 
 lously infatuated with his bear-leader, will 
 take it in wonderful good part, that I invite 
 him to dinner." 
 
 The warm-hearted girls were disappointed. 
 But they were too glad of any opportunity of 
 showing kindness to Mrs Fairfax, to quarrel 
 with the means that secured it. They really 
 desired, too, to make acquaintance with the 
 excellent son of whom they had heard so 
 many honourable traits. 
 
 VOL. I. L 
 
218 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 But in this they were not fated to be gratified. 
 The card was written and despatched; but 
 answered by a note expressive of the regret 
 of Mr Philip Fairfax that a prior engagement 
 would prevent his accepting the polite invita- 
 tion of Lord and Lady Hillingdon. 
 
 "I am glad to see that the gentleman 
 knows his place," said George, handing over 
 the excuse to his sisters. " Aware that the 
 compliment must have been intended for 
 Lord John, he is wise enough to abstain 
 from society where he would be so completely 
 out of his level. i Order is Heaven's first 
 law! 7 and I am the last man in the world 
 to infringe it by degenerating into bad 
 company." 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 219 
 
 CHAPTEE XII. 
 
 From his youth upwards to the present day, 
 
 When vices more than years have marked him gray, 
 
 "When riotous excess with wasteful hand 
 
 Shakes life's frail glass, and hastes each ebbing sand, 
 
 Unmindful from what stock he drew his birth, 
 
 Untainted with one deed of sterling worth, 
 
 Lothario holding honour at no price, 
 
 Folly to folly adds, and vice to vice. 
 
 CHUECHILL. 
 
 LORD HILLINGDON was a man who, after 
 devoting his best years to the extinction of his 
 natural good qualities, had put it out of his 
 power to consult any other object in life than 
 to keep his creditors quiet, and his house free 
 from executions. By the excesses of a few 
 pleasant days, he had embittered and discre- 
 dited the remaining years of his life. 
 
 The heartless conduct of his wife had 
 deadened all conjugal affection. But even 
 
 L 2 
 
220 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 his children exercised little influence over 
 his feelings. He took no thought for their 
 interests, either moral or worldly ; his chief 
 care being to make the best of things, out of 
 which it was difficult to make anything good. 
 The Sir Eobert Dashwood, for instance, for 
 whom his lordship had bespoken the courtesies 
 of his family, was a man without further 
 claim to their good will than being mortgagee, 
 to the amount of two-and-twenty thousand 
 pounds, of the Hillingdon estates ; a claim 
 which might be at any moment enforced. 
 For four years past, Sir Eobert Dash- 
 wood had hinted such an intention ; and 
 Lord Hillingdon, instead of frankly meeting 
 the proposition with an explanation of his 
 position, adopted the shuffling policy of cajo- 
 ling and conciliating the man of whose will 
 and power he stood in awe. Accustomed to 
 treat with unworthy persons, he felt con- 
 vinced that by allowing Sir Eobert to form 
 a surmise of the embarrassed state of his cir- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 221 
 
 cumstances he should convert their friend- 
 ship into an affair of plaintiff and defendant. 
 
 In this, as in most arguments inferring the 
 worthlessness of human nature, the cunning 
 calculator calculated too cunningly. Sir 
 Robert Dashwood was the same worthy man 
 in deed as in word; and had he suspected 
 that his old acquaintance and schoolfellow 
 regarded his intentions with alarm, would 
 have rejoiced in setting his mind at ease. 
 
 The mortgage entered upon for a limited 
 term, for the accommodation of his friend, 
 had been appointed by Lord Hillingdon 
 to be redeemable on George's coming 
 of age ; in the idea that he should then 
 command the means of clearing his property 
 of encumbrances. But these encumbrances 
 having been quadrupled by subsequent follies, 
 the relief he was about to obtain from the 
 coalescence of his son was devoted to urgent 
 demands, leaving nothing for old Dashwood 
 and his mortgage. 
 
222 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 Had this been fairly stated to the worthy 
 man, who had, in fact, no immediate views 
 for the re-investment of the money, all had 
 been understood and arranged. But when 
 he saw the Hillingdons launching into extra- 
 ordinary expenses, and dazzling all eyes with 
 their splendour, it was but natural he should 
 conclude their difficulties to be at an end, and 
 feel privileged to assert his claims upon the 
 property. 
 
 It was to evade these with decency, or what 
 he considered decency, that Lord Hillingdon's 
 efforts were directed. Trusting, with the 
 sanguine and irrational reliance of an incor- 
 rigible gambler, to the luck of the season for 
 redemption from all his difficulties, he felt 
 convinced that, in the course of the autumn, 
 the result of his turf-engagements would place 
 him in a situation to square accounts with his 
 friend; and all he wished was to keep the 
 baronet in good humour by good dinners, and 
 preserve harmony with Lady Dashwood, by 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 223 
 
 listening unconvulsed with laughter to her 
 attempts at singing. 
 
 Sir Robert was a county member, whose 
 prose had been listened to for the last twenty 
 years, with respect in the House, and pa- 
 tience, out ; an exceedingly narrative old 
 gentleman, who would lend his ears to the 
 longest story, to have the satisfaction of re- 
 peating it in his turn. Circumstantial as a 
 legal conveyance, as an auditor he was full 
 of questions, as, when a narrator, of exple- 
 tives. 
 
 Yet to his longest stories, did Lord Hill- 
 ingdon require his family to listen, with an 
 air of lively interest; till, at the dinners in 
 Hill street, old Dashwood's prose kept up a 
 sort of privileged running-bass accompani- 
 ment, to the small-talk of the rest; a mur- 
 mur, as of the distant ocean, filling the ear 
 with vague but irresistible lassitude. 
 
 Of all this, Mary and Agatha Joddrell 
 were too amiable and forbearing to take much 
 
224 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 heed. But Lady Hillingdon complained bit- 
 terly to Lady Ursula Wainwright of the cruel 
 necessity of being bored with such people as 
 the Dash woods; and when at length the old 
 people came accompanied by a nephew, a Mr 
 Dashwood, the heir of the good old baronet, 
 even the girls grew out of patience. 
 
 For the heir apparent was a bore of a very 
 different calibre from his uncle. Young Dash- 
 wood was as rash and rapid as old Dashwood 
 was deliberate. He had been up in a balloon, 
 down in a diving-bell, and was the original 
 devisor of the aerial carriage. Everything 
 he did, said, wore, ate, or drank, was done, 
 said, worn, eaten, and drunk, on the newest 
 and most approved principle. The most 
 minute action of his life might have afforded 
 matter for a patent. 
 
 A man less calm and unexcitable than Sir 
 Robert, could not have endured such a whir- 
 ligig in his house. But throughout Bob 
 Dashwood's flights and innovations, his uncle 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 225 
 
 went prosing on ; and Bob protested that 
 lie sometimes set off to row to Putney bridge 
 at the commencement of one of his set stories, 
 and was back again at Richmond terrace 
 before the baronet had pottered to an end. 
 On the principle, perhaps, that extremes meet, 
 they agreed perfectly ; and like the moment- 
 hand and hour-hand, which, with so different 
 an impetus, move in harmony upon the same 
 dial-plate, got on extremely well together. 
 
 There was no point on which the uncle 
 and nephew were more unanimous than in 
 admiration of Agatha Joddrell. Her mild 
 countenance, her gentle voice, her unpresu- 
 ming deportment, pointed her out as the dis- 
 penser of future happiness at Clarendon Hill, 
 when Sir Eobert should have worn down his 
 last story, and Lady Dashwood quavered her 
 last canzonet ; and the worthy people who, on 
 ordinary occasions, found their requests met 
 with obsequious compliance on the part of the 
 Hillingdons, fancied they had only to ask and 
 
 L3 
 
226 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 have, even when the concession regarded 
 the daughter of their acquiescent friends. 
 
 In this opinion they were so far justified, 
 that, on a mere supposition of their views, 
 Lord Hillingdon issued his commands that 
 Bob Dashwood should be treated with es- 
 pecial distinction in Hill street ; encouraged 
 as a morning visitor, invited as a dinner 
 guest, and courted as a partner and carriage- 
 caller at every ball. While George insisted 
 that Agatha should encourage Sir Richard 
 Davenport, as a security for his autumn 
 sport, Lord Hillingdon protected the pre- 
 tensions of Mr Robert Dashwood, as a se- 
 curity for his summer's play. 
 
 Their lady-mother meanwhile, whose appre- 
 ciation of her daughters was surprisingly 
 raised by the discovery that, though girls of 
 fourteen and fifteen are sad drawbacks upon 
 a mother's pretensions to youth, girls of 
 eighteen and nineteen afford a considerable 
 accession to a mother's pretensions to popu- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 227 
 
 larity, had begun to form projects in their 
 behalf of far too splendid a character to com- 
 prehend a country baronet, either regnant or 
 expectant. 
 
 " You would scarcely think it," she observed 
 in one of her confidential conferences with 
 Lady Ursula, soon after the dandy dinner- 
 party given by her son, " but George's friend, 
 Lord John, is decidedly smitten with Agatha. 
 The other evening, at Lady Reigate's, he 
 scarcely quitted her side." 
 
 " I am not surprised. Mary and Agatha 
 have always danglers about them of one 
 kind or other. They are great talkers ; 
 and young men like to flirt away an hour 
 with girls who give no trouble in drawing 
 out." 
 
 "To do them justice, however, I must say 
 I never saw two girls less addicted to flirt- 
 ing ! " said Lady Hillingdon, almost indig- 
 nantly. " They are pleasant and chatty ; and 
 therefore extremely popular." 
 
228 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 " Beware of letting them split on that 
 rock ! " cried Lady Ursula. " I never saw a 
 girl form a good match, who was what is called 
 popular. No one cares to appropriate such 
 general property. " 
 
 " I should say the greatest danger arose 
 from their own fastidiousness," observed Lady 
 Hillingdon, languidly. " They grow so ac- 
 customed to being followed, that change of 
 society becomes natural, and variety an indis- 
 pensable excitement. It is only the heroine 
 of a single conquest who sits down contented 
 with her good luck, and issues orders in all 
 possible haste for her wedding-cake and 
 clothes. " 
 
 u Well ! I only hope Agatha and Mary 
 may make their single conquest and put their 
 trousseau in hand, without delay. It would 
 be a great relief to all of you. Look at 
 your two younger sisters !" said Lady Ursula. 
 
 " Charlotte and Harriet would have been 
 just as cross and discontented, had they mar- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 229 
 
 ried at fifteen. Our girls have been diffe- 
 rently brought up." 
 
 Eecalling to mind the complaints against 
 Mrs Fairfax's modes of education, which for 
 ten years were poured into her ears, Lady 
 Ursula replied by a silent elevation of the 
 eyebrows and depression of the corners of 
 her mouth. 
 
 ie And as to conquests," resumed Lady Hill- 
 ingdon, piqued by the implied sarcasm, "Aga- 
 tha might marry Bob Dashwood to-morrow." 
 
 " Bob Dashwood will never marry, take 
 my word for it, till wives are manufactured 
 by some patent process exhibited at the Eoyal 
 Institution." 
 
 " Well then, Sir Richard Davenport ! 
 He troubles his head very little about 
 science " 
 
 " Or young ladies ! Sir Richard thinks 
 of nothing but motions and majorities. Sir 
 Richard is absorbed in politics." 
 
 " Not so much absorbed as to prevent his 
 
230 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 proposing to Agatha last week, who would 
 have refused him outright, had not George 
 put his father up to asking time to enable 
 
 them to become better acquainted Sir 
 
 Kichard, therefore, is on probation." 
 
 " Poor Herbert Davenport ! I would not 
 give much for his chance of the title and 
 estate ! Chateau qui parle et femme qui 
 ecoute you know, are on the point of 
 surrender." 
 
 " But Agatha does not listen. She knows 
 nothing about the matter." 
 
 "It all comes to the same thing in the end. 
 When she does become enlightened, she will 
 not long remain blind to the beauties of the 
 Grange." 
 
 " Nor to the capricious temper of its mas- 
 ter. No Sir Eichard Davenport for Agatha! 
 I cannot think why George considered it 
 even worth while to deliberate." 
 
 "You intend her then to become Mrs 
 Dashwood?" 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 231 
 
 " Why limit her chance to the alternative? 
 I tell you that Lord John is twice as much in 
 love with her as her brother ever can have 
 been with Caroline Clutterbuck, whom you 
 insist upon it he will end by marrying." 
 
 " Lord John, I imagine, is somewhat more 
 under the control of Lord Wrexhill, than 
 George under yours or his father's." 
 
 " But why should Lord Wrexhill oppose his 
 marrying Agatha?" 
 
 " Not to speak it ungraciously, I fancy Lord 
 Wrexhill would oppose his marrying any one. 
 They mean Lord John Howard to distinguish 
 himself in public life." 
 
 " Is that an insuperable obstacle to his being 
 happy in private?" 
 
 " And then he is to pass a year abroad, 
 before he comes into parliament." 
 
 " Very likely. But I do not suppose Agatha 
 would object to travel with her husband on the 
 continent ? " 
 
 "Her husband, foi d'Ursule! Lord John 
 
232 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 Howard will never be ! It is not worth while 
 arguing the point. You know as well as I do 
 the disadvantage a rising young man incurs 
 by too early a marriage." 
 
 " Not where rank and fortune are united, 
 as in the case of Lord John Howard. He has 
 his mother's estates at Coleby, you know " 
 
 "And Mary?" interrupted Lady Ursula 
 Wainwright, not choosing to give in. " Has 
 she her suitors and tens of suitors, like her 
 sister Agatha?" 
 
 " Oh ! with Mary I have no patience ! The 
 Duke of Attleborough only wants the slightest 
 encouragement to become her declared lover ; 
 and Mary treats him with the most marked 
 indifference ! " 
 
 " There may be policy in that. 11 
 
 " There might be, in any case but Mary's ; 
 but hers is downright stupidity. Mary does 
 not like him. She says he gives so vile a 
 proof of taste by entertaining that Mr Herbert 
 Davenport as a hanger-on." 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 233 
 
 " Herbert Davenport is much obliged to 
 her. Not a man in town who has just now 
 greater succes! I recommend Mary not to 
 make him her enemy. He is a person whom 
 it would be by no means safe to provoke." 
 
 " That is exactly her opinion of him. She 
 thinks him mischievous, and a mauvaise 
 langue; and wonders the duke can choose such 
 an associate. But hush ! I hear my sister 
 Charlotte's voice on the stairs. Charlotte 
 always makes her way here on Tuesdays and 
 Saturdays, to see whether I have a cold or a 
 fit of laziness, leaving a vacant place for her 
 for the opera." 
 
 " Can she not go with Mrs Clutterbuck? 
 Mrs Clutterbuck, who has that charming 
 double box, and could accommodate the whole 
 Corbet family, even if each young lady had as 
 many adorers as Agatha and Mary ! " 
 
 " As if Charlotte had not tact enough to 
 prefer going with us when she is able ! But 
 
234 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 George (though he never enters our box), 
 has made it a point that my sisters shall not 
 be quartered on the girls." 
 
 " Considerate enough ! " 
 
 " Considerate ? I am certain it is only to 
 prevent tittle-tattle between Hill street and 
 Portland place!" 
 
 " Surely he has no reason to complain of 
 your over-civility towards poor Mrs Clut- 
 terbuck ? " 
 
 a How am I to show her civility? We 
 never meet." 
 
 "Whose fault is that?" 
 
 " Sophia's, for choosing to marry a man 
 who has assigned her no place in society." 
 
 " Would she have attained a better, by 
 remaining in single blessedness at Hindon 
 Manor? She is much happier with her fine 
 clothes, fine park, fine daughters, and coarse 
 husband, than Miss Charlotte and Miss Harriet 
 Corbet without them. Ha ! Miss Corbet, how 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 235 
 
 do you do? What a sweet paille de riz! 
 What delicate flowers ! I never saw so pale 
 a pink!" 
 
 "It is not my fault if Devy has chosen to 
 put pink flowers in my bonnet!" said the 
 crabbed Charlotte, always on the look out for 
 an affront. 
 
 " How do, Char.!" said Lady Hillingdon. 
 " D^vy, did you say? Do you employ that 
 extravagant woman? " 
 
 " So long as I do not run in debt, it signifies 
 little whom I employ," retorted her sister. 
 "It is not people who are addicted to bargain- 
 shops, who are the most economical." 
 
 " Is Sophia addicted to bargain-shops?" 
 coolly demanded Lady Hillingdon, knowing 
 from experience that there was no surer mode 
 of diverting her sister's attention than by 
 attacking Mrs Clutterbuck. 
 
 " Sophia? With fifteen thousand a year 
 and not an embarrassment in the world ! 
 
236 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 Inquire of Vouillon, and you will find that all 
 the best things she gets from Paris are bespoken 
 by the Clutterbucks." 
 
 " I never inquire anything of Vouillon," 
 said Lady Ursula. " Dressiness is so com- 
 pletely gone by, in our world, that poor 
 Vouillon would be a bankrupt were it not 
 for her Marylebone customers." 
 
 " Yes ! I fancy her customers of Mayfair 
 had been almost too much for her!" said 
 Charlotte Corbet, whose angry cheeks now 
 afforded a vivid contrast to the pale pink 
 flowers. People who pay once in five years, 
 make it very necessary to have a few ready- 
 money patronesses on her books." 
 
 " But how are ready-money customers to be 
 on any one's books?" inquired Lady Ursula, 
 provokingly. 
 
 " She means on Vouillon's good books ! " 
 explained Lady Hillingdon, with a smile. 
 
 " By the way, Miss Corbet, is the report in 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 237 
 
 the papers true that your brother-in-law 
 is to be made a baronet?" inquired Lady 
 Ursula. 
 
 " I should have thought that a man who 
 has made himself, would scorn to be made any- 
 thing by the throne!" interrupted Lady 
 Hillingdon. 
 
 "It is true titles have been brought into 
 sad disrepute of late years," retorted Charlotte, 
 with rising wrath. " But the option has not 
 been offered, I believe, to Mr Clutterbuck. 
 He is not a trafficker with government. Do 
 you go to the opera to-night, Emma?" 
 
 " Why not?" 
 
 " Oh ! nothing. Only as you are looking 
 fatigued and ill, I thought you might be glad 
 to be spared the trouble of chaperoning the 
 girls." 
 
 " Thank you, I am neither fatigued nor ill. 
 I suppose my cap is not quite so becoming as 
 those of Devy and Youillon. It came straight 
 from Herbault, who seems to care more for 
 
238 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 making one look like a lady, than like a 
 beauty." 
 
 " I should be sorry to think my looks de- 
 pended on my cap." 
 
 " Should you? Oh! it is always a comfort 
 to have something to fall back upon; to 
 know that any fine day one wishes to look 
 less than absolutely frightful, two guineas' 
 worth of frippery will set one up ! But tell 
 me, Char., are such the ways of Portland 
 place that a spinster like yourself is con- 
 sidered a safe chaperon?" 
 
 " I never offer myself as a chaperon in 
 Portland place," replied Miss Corbet with 
 spirit. " Sophia is not too languid to escort 
 her girls, when they need her care ; and with 
 her I am sure of a seat, whether I can make 
 myself useful or not. I did not offer myself 
 to her as a chaperon. I was sure of a kind 
 invitation, as her sister." 
 
 Lady Hillingdon had now received a harder 
 rap on the knuckles than, even with the aid 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 239 
 
 of Lady Ursula's flippancy, she was able to 
 parry. The only way to cut matters short, 
 was by an inquiry after her father and 
 mother. " Had Charlotte any news from 
 Hindon?" 
 
 " Papa and mamma are coming up to 
 town next week." 
 
 "To town? For what, in the name of 
 wonder, at their age, and both invalids ! " 
 
 " It may not be quite so pleasant to Har- 
 riet to pass another spring in Cheshire; 
 and Sophia cannot accommodate both of us." 
 
 " For which reason, she is going to accom- 
 modate the whole family?" 
 
 "Papa and mamma are going to an 
 hotel." 
 
 " What an expense, and what an incon- 
 venience to people of their settled habits ! " 
 said Lady Ursula. 
 
 " Strange as it may appear to your lady- 
 ship," said the snappish spinster, " they have 
 not wholly got rid of their natural affections. 
 
240 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 They want to see their children, they want 
 to see their grand-children. It is three years 
 since they were last in Surrey ; and papa is 
 naturally anxious to have a look at Car. and 
 Emma, of whose beauty he has of course 
 heard so much, and of whom he was always 
 so fond." 
 
 " Ah ! they are coming up to see Car. and 
 Emma Clutterbuck?" said Lady Hillingdon, 
 with a smile such as Sir Eichard Davenport 
 might have envied. " Their trip will not cost 
 them above a hundred pounds, and the sight 
 will be cheap at the money ! " 
 
 " How wonderfully economical you have 
 suddenly grown ! " cried her sister. " And yet, 
 as I looked in upon Agatha and Mary as I 
 came up stairs, I found them writing out 
 cards for a ball." 
 
 "And the Portland place beauties would 
 have scorned so menial an occupation! The 
 Misses Clutterbuck, no doubt, are above 
 making themselves useful?" 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 241 
 
 " I am not aware that the poor girls hold 
 themselves above being anything, except envi- 
 ous and spiteful. But I must not keep Sophia's 
 horses waiting. Good bye. If convenient and 
 agreeable to you to see papa and mamma 
 when they arrive, you can let them know. 
 They will be at Coulson's hotel." 
 
 And with this sarcasm, she took leave. 
 But though intended only as a taunt, there 
 was truth in the libel. It was not either 
 convenient or agreeable to Lady Hillingdon 
 just then to meet her parents. Keckless as 
 she was, and now for five-and-twenty years 
 emancipated from their sway, the majesty of 
 parental authority can never be altogether 
 defied; and of all the world, the callous 
 Emma stood most in awe of her father. 
 
 Mr Corbet was a man of the world on 
 whom ill health had wrought a healing and 
 happy change. The scales had fallen from 
 his eyes, enabling him to see through the 
 delusions still prevalent in his family. But 
 
 VOL. I. M 
 
242 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 this did but fill his mind with anxiety. For 
 it was part of the evil result of the educa- 
 tion he had bestowed on his children, that 
 parental influence was set at nought; and 
 vainly did he strive to impress upon the 
 minds of Emma and Sophia the cruelty of 
 perpetuating all that his heartlessness had 
 been the means of entailing on themselves. 
 
 The reply of Lady Hillingdon, that she 
 brought up her children in a way befitting 
 their rank in life, and the reply of Mrs 
 Clutterbuck, that hers were educated to do 
 honour to the vast fortune awaiting them, 
 were intended to mark to their father the 
 superiority of their own position to the ob- 
 scurity and penury of Hindon Manor; and 
 to the unfilial insults of his Eegan and 
 Goneril, Mr Corbet submitted without re- 
 tort, but not without anguish. 
 
 He had attained that serious epoch of life, 
 when the glitter of the world grows impor- 
 tunate, when the grave becomes a reality 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 243 
 
 to be dreaded, not a word to be slurred over 
 in polite conversation; when the Sunday 
 afternoon's sermon is not felt to be too long, 
 nor the newspaper description of an archery- 
 fete, too short. For many years of his life, 
 he had been in jest ; he was now in earnest. 
 Half of his family pronounced him to be 
 nervous ; and the other half, a bore. His 
 spinster daughters proposed taking him to 
 Cheltenham or Leamington, protesting that 
 his digestion was impaired, that his hypo* 
 chondriacism would soon give way to blue 
 pill and Jephson; while Mrs Corbet, who 
 understood only one cause for despondency, 
 began to apprehend that her husband's affairs 
 were out of order. One of the objects of her 
 present journey to town, was to obtain if 
 possible a secret interview with his banker, 
 and ascertain whether he might not have 
 been dabbling in joint-stock companies or 
 railway scrip. 
 
 Thus is it, evermore, amid the stir and 
 
 M2 
 
244 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 bustle of the world ! The grave man is pro- 
 nounced to be dull, the unhappy man to 
 be sullen, the reserved man to be a bear, 
 the enthusiast to be a lunatic ; and thus, 
 the only member of the family whose good 
 sense might have been serviceable to the 
 Clutterbucks, or whose good feeling advan- 
 tageous to the Joddrells, was thrown aside 
 like a moth-eaten garment. Previous to the 
 good old man's arrival in town, it was pre- 
 concerted in both establishments that his 
 visits should be evaded as often as de- 
 cency would allow, with that lie of cen- 
 turies the plausible pretext of " not at 
 home!"- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 245 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 Sir S. Legend. To find a young fellow, who is neither a wit 
 in his own eye nor a fool in the eye of the world, is a hard 
 task. But faith and troth, you speak very discreetly. 
 
 CONGREVE. 
 
 WHY is it that even the brightest destinies 
 in England are so often clouded with care ? 
 that, however brilliant their career, or plea- 
 sant their abiding place, our countrymen 
 evince such restless delight in the vicissitudes 
 of foreign travel? 
 
 Is it the humid climate of the country? 
 is it the sulphurous atmosphere of the coal- 
 grimed town? or is it that the heavy carving 
 and gilding with which we are apt to clog the 
 chariot wheels of time, somewhat retard their 
 
246 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 velocity? Have we not made the comfortable 
 too much our study? Has not life become 
 too gorgeous a ceremony? Are we not vir- 
 tually the slaves of hours and conventions, 
 instituted by vulgar prejudice? Is it not 
 proved by fact that (like some pampered 
 youth who, throwing aside the mantle of 
 sables and velvet under which he is weighed 
 down, warms his blood from stagnation by a 
 five minutes* run upon the snow,) we enjoy 
 ourselves twice as much when vagabondizing 
 amid the slip-shod habits of the continent? 
 In England, some people are too pious to be 
 amused, some, too fine. The sect of the 
 Nihil admirari-ans has exercised a grievous 
 influence in extinguishing the cheerfulness of 
 society. Even those most covetous of diver- 
 sion are seldom satisfied that they have reached 
 the right moment for attaining it. They 
 admit that last week was a pleasant one, and 
 look forward to some ensuing party ; but it 
 would be infra dig. to acknowledge, even to 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 247 
 
 themselves, that they were actually experienc- 
 ing enjoyment. 
 
 The English entertain a vague apprehension 
 that there is something silly in being merry. 
 They interrogate their sense of pleasure too 
 fastidiously. In the midst of the pleasantest 
 party on the sunniest day, they fret them- 
 selves by surmising whether they might not 
 be more comfortable if they had an easier 
 shoe or lighter hat ; and at the very 
 height of their jubilee, suddenly remember that 
 they are keeping the carriage waiting. So 
 commercial are the habits of the land, that 
 even their bills of self-satisfaction are drawn 
 at thirty days' sight; while foreigners pay 
 themselves in ready money, even though they 
 pay in sixpences ! 
 
 The Clutterbucks, who in Surrey were 
 always pining after the return of the London 
 season, and in London consoling the dis- 
 appointment of their undue pretensions by 
 looking forward to their aggrandization in 
 
248 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 Surrey, would have been happy girls in France, 
 with one rough home, brightened by occa- 
 sional snatches at diversion, but still more, by 
 cheerfulness and content. 
 
 Even the Duke of Attleborough and Lord 
 John Howard, amid the fluttering pleasures of 
 their London season, had found leisure to 
 become^ conscious of the petty irritations of 
 life. Among the idle and frivolous by whom 
 they were surrounded, whisperers had been 
 found to incite uneasy feelings between the 
 young cousins ; jealousies and heart-burnings, 
 such as even the most straightforward good 
 sense cannot always hold in check. At the 
 end of July, they parted in town, or rather 
 each quitted London for the Rhine, without 
 parting or adieu, and with mutual feelings of 
 pique. 
 
 Yet no sooner was it mentioned to the Duke 
 of Attleborough, in the course of his conver- 
 sation with the Frankfort banker to whom he 
 was delivering his letters of credit, that his 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 249 
 
 noble countryman, " Monsieur Milor Jean 
 Owad," had arrived there the preceding day, 
 than the Duke flew to the Hotel de Russie, 
 where Howard and Fairfax were installed, and 
 the young men were friends in a minute. 
 
 Every cloud seemed removed from their 
 frank minds and honest hearts, by a few weeks' 
 sojourn on the continent. Each had so much 
 to tell, Lord John of his tour in Holland, and 
 the duke of his diversions at Spa and Wies- 
 baden, that Fairfax had time to pass a valuable 
 morning in inspecting the antiquities of the 
 Romer, before they missed him from their 
 side. 
 
 One subject of common interest, however, 
 seemed still interdicted. To the Hillingdon 
 family, neither of them adverted : the Duke of 
 Attleborough having been induced by Herbert 
 Davenport to believe that the coldness with 
 which Mary Joddrell repulsed his attentions 
 arose from her preference of Lord John 
 
 Howard ; while Lord John had been privately 
 
 M3 
 
250 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 apprized by Bob Dashwood, that his noble 
 cousin was playing a capital game with the 
 Hillingdons, causing the whole family to 
 make love to him, by the pretence of making 
 love to Mary. 
 
 By these means, each was irritated against 
 >the other. But on meeting again, with the 
 instinctive cordiality so natural at their age, 
 they tacitly agreed to avoid future motives of 
 dissatisfaction by banishing from their con- 
 versation, if they could not from their thoughts, 
 the fair causes of their disunion. 
 
 Of the two cousins, though his grace was 
 two years the elder, Lord John was far the 
 graver. For the duke, succeeding in infancy 
 to his title and estates, had been suffered by a 
 doating mother to run wild in childhood ; while 
 Lord John, destined from his cradle to a 
 public career, had been educated from the 
 moment he could speak. 
 
 The two Scottish uncles who officiated as 
 guardians to his grace, directed their sole 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 251 
 
 attention to his pecuniary affairs, in the con- 
 viction that in these times of spendthrifthood, 
 to prevent a young duke from growing up 
 extravagant, was all that was incumbent on 
 them ; while the Marquis of Wrexhill, who of 
 all possible books held accompt books the least 
 important, trained his favourite son to become 
 a statesman, rather than a man of business. 
 
 With rare good luck, both of these rash 
 systems prospered. Attleborough was neither 
 a miser nor a prodigal, Lord John neither 
 a bookworm nor a blockhead; and both 
 were disposed to bask in the sunny summer- 
 time of life, ere they began to reap its har- 
 vests, and lay in their winter store. 
 
 " I have been having such capital fun at 
 Spa!" said the duke, when at length they 
 closed their morning with a drive along the 
 banks of the Mein, to leave their names at 
 the country-house of the English minister, to 
 whom they had brought letters. 
 
 " Were there any London people?" 
 
252 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 " Very few. Parliament detains them in 
 town too late for the season of the German 
 baths. But we had lots of Eussians besides 
 Prince Albert of Reuss, and his pretty, romping 
 bride ; a few charming Belgians ; several 
 capital fellows who may have been Prus- 
 sians, Bavarians, Austrians, or Wirtembergers 
 but at all events (by their pipes and sauer- 
 kraut) Germans ; and, though last not least, 
 a few highly-amusing Americans." 
 
 " I never yet saw an American to my 
 taste," said Lord John. " If educated, they 
 are self-sufficient, if uneducated, coarse; but 
 invariably disagreeable." 
 
 " They amuse me. One may always laugh 
 at or with them ; and we had field for both. 
 There was a capital family of savages, 
 gen-uine as imported from the Ohio, of the 
 name of Sogg; a papa and mamma Sogg, 
 with Miss Olympia, Miss Euphrasia, and a 
 whole horde of close-shorn long-backed little 
 monsters, Master Ephraim Sogg, Master Cle- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 253 
 
 omenes, and Master Hugo Grotius ; all as 
 good as anything one finds in Mrs Trollope. 
 But by way of counterbalance to their vul-. 
 garity, there was a delightful fellow, one of 
 the pleasantest I ever met, with a lovely 
 Creole wife. I assure you, Colonel Cleve- 
 land might have figured at Crockford's or 
 Almack's without having his Yankeeism de- 
 tected." 
 
 " But was he an American?" 
 
 "Oh! yes!" replied the duke in a sing-, 
 song tone, borrowed of Charles Mathews 
 or Miss Olympia Sogg. " One of those 
 wealthy Americans who, finding nothing at 
 home to buy with their money (not even the 
 comforts and decencies of life,) are forced to 
 become absentees. Cleveland is the finest 
 rider you ever saw; and why is he to deny 
 himself the gratification of fox-hunting and 
 the turf ? Then, his conversational powers 
 are something really amazing ! I never heard 
 such a flow of wit. He was quite the rage ! 
 
254 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 At Spa, the pretty Belgians were at his 
 feet; and if the Emperor should happen to 
 learn the sort of antics that his beautiful 
 Countess Sabranitecki was playing with 
 the handsome American, I fancy the Seven 
 Stars would have to strike their flag on the 
 Neva." 
 
 "And the pretty Creole?" 
 
 " An insignificant little doll. The sort of 
 trinket that a rich parvenu hangs to his 
 watchchain as an ornament, and allows to 
 glitter there without taking further heed." 
 
 " Tour friend then is a roue ? A Yankee 
 roue ! What an anomaly ! " 
 
 " Cleveland is a monstrous fine fellow, full 
 of cleverness and warm feeling; but I don't 
 know that I should praise him on the score of 
 his morality," replied the duke. " And you, 
 Jack ! What pleasant acquaintances did you 
 make among the Yrowes and burgomasters?" 
 
 " I found delightful society at the Hague. 
 The Dutch court is the only really courtly 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 255 
 
 gathering-place remaining for Carlists, Tories, 
 and Legitimists." 
 
 " Carlists and Legitimists !" 
 
 " Even a liberal like yourself must admit 
 that they have their merits. The standstill 
 tribe have more leisure for polishing their 
 manners and cultivating their minds, than 
 the push-on-keep-moving order, such as your- 
 self and Bob Dashwood." 
 
 " And you really found the standstills 
 agreeable?" 
 
 " Exceedingly ! people of simple, cordial, 
 character, that put to the blush those var- 
 nished surfaces we left behind in London." 
 
 " London women are, I admit, the most 
 worldly of human beings ! " observed the 
 duke, with a sigh. 
 
 " Fine ladies are, probably, worldly, in every 
 clime and country. But the worldliness of 
 London girls is certainly the most offensive. 
 Marrying so much later in life than the 
 women of other lands, the girls of London 
 
256 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 become guilty of arts and manoeuvres which 
 elsewhere belong by privilege to married 
 
 women." 
 
 " And where do you pass the winter, 
 Jack?" inquired the duke, feeling that they 
 were approaching tender ground. 
 
 " At Florence, or perhaps Venice. I must 
 do something besides amuse myself. At 
 Eome or Naples, there would be no resisting 
 the seductions of society. And you?" 
 
 "J mean to amuse myself. Eome or 
 Naples, therefore, is my mark! But I shall 
 loiter away a month first on the Khine, and 
 in Switzerland." 
 
 " In that case, let us proceed together !" 
 said Lord John. " Fairfax and I do not 
 want to be in Italy till September; and you 
 may take leave of us at our winter quarters, 
 before you proceed to the South." 
 
 The news of this arrangement was highly 
 welcome to Philip Fairfax. The liveliness of 
 the Duke of Attleborough was just what he 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 257 
 
 wanted in the companion of his pupil, who 
 was of a graver turn of mind than at his 
 years appeared desirable. Fairfax knew that 
 it was Lord WrexhilFs desire to promote a 
 friendship between the two young men; the 
 wishes of the family being centred in an alli- 
 ance between Lord John and his cousin, Lady 
 Julia Howard; so that the tutor's satisfaction 
 at being in some degree exonerated from the 
 task of companionship, was every way justi- 
 fiable. 
 
 The advantage, meanwhile, was mutual. 
 To secure the company of Fairfax and his 
 cousin, the duke was easily persuaded to 
 visit monuments and examine antiquities, 
 to which, alone, he would not have given 
 a moment's attention; and while the two 
 learned pundits were reading or conversing, 
 it was his grace's amusement to prepare for 
 them a sail upon the Rhine, a scamper 
 through the valleys, or some mining expe- 
 dition, coming within his notions of a lark. 
 
258 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 Between ruins, monasteries, operas at 
 Frankfort, and carouses at Heidelberg, they 
 passed a pleasant and varied autumn ; 
 figuring one morning among the courtierlings 
 at Mannheim, and next day, at one of the 
 charming fetes of the charming Duchesse 
 D'Alberg. 
 
 These diversions and the month of Oc- 
 tober had drawn to a close, when the 
 party found themselves sole occupants of 
 the vast hotel of the Badische Hof at 
 Baden; where the swarm of gaudy sum- 
 mer flies had vanished, and nothing was 
 to be seen but carts loading with the 
 batteries de cuisine of customerless re- 
 staurateurs, and the fiddle-cases of departed 
 orchestras. 
 
 The weather was cheerless. The autumn 
 wind blew hither and thither in volleys 
 the seared leaves of the beech woods. Stern 
 masses of rock were beginning to be re- 
 vealed on the precipitous cdtes sheltering 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 259 
 
 the town, so that the grey ruins of the 
 old castle were no longer distinguishable in 
 solitary contrast with the dark green pines; 
 and nothing less than the temptation afforded 
 by the announcement of a grand ducal 
 boar-hunt in the neighbourhood of Forbach, 
 on the morrow, would have induced the 
 party to remain four-and-twenty hours 
 longer in the desolate spot. 
 
 It was some comfort that they were not 
 destined to remain quite alone in the 
 galleried barn, through whose corridors the 
 wind was howling so dolefully. Late in 
 the evening of the stormy day of their 
 arrival, a considerable bustle in the house 
 announced newer comers than themselves. 
 The old roof rang with the swearing of 
 couriers and shrillness of lady's maids; till 
 the duke could not resist inquiring the 
 name of the new comers, prepared of course 
 to receive the answer that awaited him, of 
 " Oest un milor, on ne sait pas encore 
 
260 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 son nom!" but not prepared to receive 
 contrary intelligence from his English valet, 
 " that 'twas nothing but a set of nasty 
 forruners." 
 
 On the morrow, mounted on such steeds 
 as they were able to procure, the cousins 
 were off to the glass-houses on the Forbach 
 road, the rendezvous de chasse; where the 
 Graf von Ahlenstein's people were in pos- 
 session of the little retreat, half forest- 
 lodge, half beer-house, whose quaint stag's 
 heads and wainscoting would do honour to 
 the scene of a melodrama. 
 
 They were late. Two minutes after their 
 arrival, a choice pack of powerful boarhounds 
 were cheered into the thickets. It was not, 
 however, till nearly an hour had elapsed, that 
 the young tyros in a sport much more rugged 
 and dangerous though so much less gallant 
 and exciting, than the fields of Melton, had 
 to congratulate each other on the finding 
 of what had very much the look of a 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 261 
 
 lurcher puppy, but which was announced 
 by the shouts of the Jagdmeisters to be a 
 right noble swine. 
 
 Inexperienced in the ways of the sport 
 and the place, and mounted on hacks very 
 inferior to those of Count Ahlenstein's men 
 or the foresters of the Grand Duke, the 
 Englishmen were soon distanced their horses 
 knocked up, and their spirits down. They 
 had the vexation of hearing the tumults 
 of the Jagd die away in the .distance ; 
 while their panting beasts, which had pro- 
 bably been doing duty in harness throughout 
 the Baden season, seemed scarcely capable of 
 conveying them to the little inn at Gerns- 
 bach, where they had determined to halt and 
 refresh themselves, so as not to make their 
 premature return a matter of jest for the 
 few idlers still remaining at the baths. 
 
 "How deucedly like tailors we look!" 
 said the duke to his cousin, as they 
 wound their way among trunks of newly- 
 
262 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 felled pine trees, about to be precipitated 
 down the steep banks into the Murg, which, 
 foaming below, was to convey them to the 
 Khine, thence to float, raftwise, to Namedy 
 and Dordrecht. 
 
 " Or like apprentices returning from the 
 Easter hunt ! " rejoined Lord John. " We 
 have only to fancy this green wilderness 
 Epping Forest ; these lordly pine trees, silver 
 birches; and heaven grant we may have 
 anything as good as an English beef-steak 
 and homebrewed ale awaiting us yonder at 
 Gernsbach ! " 
 
 " We are spared at least the mortifica- 
 tion of making fun for some knowing Eng- 
 lish groom, or insolent dandy!" exclaimed 
 the duke. " With all your philosophy, 
 Jack, what would you take to be disco- 
 vered in this trim by a Melton man, or 
 some park exquisite like George Joddrell?" 
 
 " Don't mention it," replied Lord John, 
 debating whether it might not be desirable 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 263 
 
 to cut a branch of furze to quicken the 
 pace of the scurvy animal which had been 
 imposed upon him. " If ever again you entrap 
 me into one of these charming expeditions, 
 I give you leave to make a show of me!" 
 
 " Ho, hilli-ho ! Attle-borough," shouted 
 a voice in the distance, which, though 
 English, certainly was not that of Fairfax, 
 the only one of their countrymen with whom 
 they were acquainted at Baden. 
 
 They stopped (though, by the way, their 
 horses seemed to find it as disagreeable to 
 stop, as difficult to proceed). But after 
 looking in every direction, no one was per- 
 ceptible, either on the forest road, or emerg- 
 ing from covert. 
 
 At length, a loud shout from the duke was 
 returned by a second " hilli-ho!" and not 
 emerging from the forest, but cantering 
 leisurely along the road from Baden, which a 
 sudden turn of the path now brought before 
 them, they discerned a point-device cavalier, 
 
264 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 mounted on a steed qualified to enchant the 
 eye of Tattersall or Cre'mieux. 
 
 " Cleveland, by Jove!" was the exclama- 
 tion of the young duke, pressing his jaded 
 beast towards the stranger. 
 
 " An American ? " exclaimed Lord John, 
 leisurely following, so as to give time for 
 greeting between the friends. " The ' milor 
 Anglais/ the ' outlandish forruner, ' a Yankee 
 after all ! Had I known as much last night, 
 by heavens I would have seen him before I 
 slept! Amid the wonders of foreign travel, 
 there is nothing I am more curious to stum- 
 ble upon than that Imus of nature and art, 
 a civilized American ! " 
 
 On coming up with the distinguished look- 
 ing horseman, Lord John, in spite of his 
 discomfited feelings, exerted himself to go 
 through with becoming courtesy his part in 
 the introduction of " Cleveland, my cousin 
 
 Lord John Howard Howard ! my friend 
 
 Colonel Cleveland." 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 265 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 Un de ces esprits vulgaires qui vivent comme voyagent les 
 marchands, en prenant les grandes routes et les voitures 
 publiques ; metaux sans valeur, mais frappes par 1'educa- 
 tion a 1'effigie courante, et que 1'on rencontre dans les 
 premiers comme dans les derniers rangs ; comme ces 
 menues monnaies qui se trouvent egalement dans la bourse 
 du riche et du pauvre. SOTJVESTBE. 
 
 WHO that has sojourned in that chartered 
 Eden of the fine and fanciful, of royal en- 
 nuyes, noble hypochondriacs, chevaliers 
 d^industrie from Paris, and dupes from all the 
 rest of Europe, Baden-Baden, but is ac- 
 quainted with Grernsbach ; the object of so 
 many sentimental pilgrimages and laughter- 
 loving pic-nics; where the foot-traveller, ex- 
 pecting to put up with the small Rhenish 
 and unctuous Kalbsbraten of a wretched 
 
 village inn, finds himself suddenly surrounded 
 VOL. I. N 
 
266 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 with Chaverf s marmitons, pressing upon him 
 a poulet a la financiere and bottle of Verze- 
 nay, subtracted from the banquet of some 
 detachment of the beau monde of Mayfair; 
 who are to be found dispersed among the 
 ledgy rocks of Ebersteinburg, perpetrating 
 sketches, collecting mosses, singing glees, talk- 
 ing nonsense, and waiting for their dinner. 
 As Cleveland and his two companions ad- 
 vanced among the saw-pits and flatting mills, 
 along that noble bend of the river Murg over- 
 looked by the heights of Eberstein, he either 
 found so much difficulty in keeping back his 
 spirited horse to the pace of the broken-down 
 Kosinantes of his noble companions, or so 
 compassionated their shame at appearing in 
 this wretched plight, as to rescind his original 
 proposal of pushing home at once together to 
 their hotel; and proposed to share their de- 
 jeuner at the Black Horse. They were soon 
 seated, accordingly, beside a table spread with 
 a gallant boar's head, with sauce of Strasburg 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 267 
 
 horseradish and moutarde de maille, cray- 
 fish from the Rhine, Forbach trout, and 
 poulet a la Tartare. Sillery and Stein- 
 berger sparkled in their glasses, and 
 pleasantry on their lips; while they jested 
 on the ill-fortune of their morning's sport, 
 and the compensation of their encounter with 
 Cleveland. 
 
 " I perceived your britszka in the yard the 
 moment I was up this morning," said Cleve- 
 land to the duke; "and having insisted on 
 being shown into the apartment of the britsz- 
 ka's master, was conducted into a room where 
 I found only the skeleton of a departed break- 
 fast, and a gentleman who seemed to have 
 been reading a funeral sermon over its re- 
 
 mains." 
 
 " My cousin's tutor," said the duke. 
 
 " Too gentlemanly a man for a pedagogue; 
 though too grave, now I think of it, for any- 
 thing else. The gentleman had just arrayed 
 himself with a tin cantine, for a botanizing 
 
 N 2 
 
268 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 expedition; but was kind enough to with- 
 draw his attention a moment from his scien- 
 tific altitudes, and inform me that the Duke 
 of Attleborough was off at day-break, boar- 
 hunting in the Black Forest, and that himself 
 remained my most obedient humble servant." 
 
 Cleveland's narrative was enlivened by such 
 clever mimicry of the somewhat prim bow 
 and precise phraseology of Philip Fairfax, 
 that the two young men, with all their re- 
 spect and love for him, found it impossible 
 to restrain their laughter. Nor did the racy 
 flint-like flavour of the sparkling wine they 
 were quaffing, diminish the merriment pro- 
 voked by their lively friend's recital of the 
 adventures he had been pursuing at Wies- 
 baden since his separation from the duke. 
 
 Colonel Cleveland's graphic sketches of 
 English tourists huddled into steamboats, or 
 scudding along the banks of the Ehine in 
 search of the Brunnen of Nassau (their Heads 
 in their hands, or their Hurrays in their 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 269 
 
 pockets), were full of humorous truth; nor 
 could his companions refute the charge 
 brought against their countrymen, whom 
 Cleveland described as yielding their purses 
 with a smile to such of the foreign swell mob 
 besetting the gaming tables of Emms, as had 
 been wise enough to write themselves down 
 princes in the arrival book, starring it among 
 their dupes with an inch of red ribbon at 
 their button-hole ; but disputing them, kreut- 
 zer by kreutzer, to the demands of tradesmen 
 or hosts. 
 
 " If you could but have seen the Regent- 
 street shopkeepers, and their chaste moities, 
 bowing and curtseying to these high-sounding 
 pickpockets, as if receiving an order over their 
 counter instead of giving an order on their 
 bankers in exchange for counterfeit counters, 
 you would have blushed for Great Britain!" 
 cried Cleveland, with a hearty laugh. 
 
 " Not another word against our cockney 
 tribes, my dear Cleveland," cried the duke; 
 
270 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 " or I will acquaint Howard before your face 
 with the full and true particulars of Miss 
 Euphrasia and Miss Evadne Sogg's crusade 
 against my hand and coronet ! Tuft-hunters 
 are abundant enough in England, but they 
 spring, like other fungi, from the lowest refuse ; 
 while you Americans seldom exhibit a taste 
 for a bit of emblazoned parchment, till you 
 have learned at school the value of heraldic 
 patent. Old Sogg is a prophet, not to say a 
 judge in his own country; Miss Euphrasia 
 4 learnt manners ' at the best boarding school 
 at Cincinnati; and Miss Evadne is a contri- 
 butor of occasional odes and essays to your 
 transatlantic annuals. They ought to have 
 known better." 
 
 " I have not a word to say in defence of the 
 Soggs ! " cried Cleveland. " But be assured 
 they are people who hold a very inferior posi- 
 tion in America." 
 
 " So I am told by your countrymen of every 
 American who makes an ass of himself in 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 271 
 
 Europe. The moment they try to be some- 
 body here, I am assured they are nobody at 
 home. That there does exist a society at New 
 York equal to that of London, no one, my dear 
 Cleveland, can doubt who has been so happy 
 as to make your acquaintance ; and yet " 
 
 " / have lived very little in America," 
 replied Cleveland, frankly. "It is only 
 because indebted to the country for my birth, 
 that I throw down the gauntlet in its defence. 
 I have not a relation in America ; and, were 
 I to consult my inclinations, should never set 
 foot upon its soil again." 
 
 " Certainly not if you consult your friends," 
 said the duke, kindly. " We have not been 
 long acquainted; but at our age, friendships 
 are soon made." 
 
 " I wish I could say at our age ! " inter- 
 rupted Cleveland. " This scar on my fore- 
 head, and the gray hairs scattered among the 
 locks above, ought to remind you that I have 
 
272 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 seen service, and am a dozen years your 
 
 senior." 
 
 " At all events, I hope you are not old enough 
 to reject my friendship ; and may it be con- 
 firmed next year upon English ground! 
 Depend on it, Cleveland, England is the place 
 where the best of everything is to be had, and 
 the best of everything is to be done." 
 
 " By the Duke of Attleborough, but not 
 by a colonel of South American cac,a- 
 dores," cried Cleveland, laughing. " We 
 Yankees, who, with our half-dozen thousands a 
 year, pass for fine things on the continent, are 
 soon crowed down in your healthy, wealthy, 
 and wise country, (whether wealthy because 
 wise, or wise because wealthy, no matter!) 
 You look down upon us with much the same 
 unfraternal contempt, exhibited by one of 
 -your magnificent elder sons towards his paltry 
 younger brother." 
 
 " Come to England, my dear sir," inter- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 273 
 
 r up ted Lord John Howard, " if only that you 
 may amend your comparisons. My elder 
 brother, Lord Sylvester, who is the finest 
 fellow breathing, treats me with signal respect, 
 merely because I am self-denying enough to 
 work instead of play, while he loves play 
 better than work." 
 
 "Play in its literal or figurative sense?" 
 inquired Cleveland. 
 
 " In both, I fear. But most young men of 
 his set and stamp, (with the exception of 
 Attleborough here,) are apt to make their 
 days miserable by making their nights 
 pleasant." 
 
 " Don't except me!" said the duke, with 
 lively frankness. " I never played in London, 
 for I had other things to entertain me. But 
 three picktooth weeks at Spa could never 
 have been got through, without a little rouge 
 et noir. I was lucky enough, however, to be 
 unlucky ; and having paid in black and white, 
 by a cheque on Coutts' for my black and red, 
 
 N3 
 
274 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 have forsworn all further encounter with the 
 pickpocket princes so characteristically de- 
 scribed by Cleveland." 
 
 " So much the better ! " cried the gallant 
 ex-colonel, filling his glass. " At your age, 
 the blood circulates too freely to admit of 
 your being trusted with such edge tools as the 
 dice box. No Englishman is safe at the gam- 
 ing table, till after thirty. My countrymen 
 may venture five years earlier. Brother 
 Jonathan, you know, is accustomed from his 
 babyhood to l carkilate,' and is less easily 
 thrown off his guard. But yonder comes my 
 carriage, for which, in charity to you and 
 yours, I despatched a messenger to Baden on 
 our arrival here. We may still do justice to 
 a late dinner, in company with Virginia and 
 my obedient humble servant, your botanizing 
 friend. And now, en route!" 
 
 Such was the casual foundation of an ac- 
 quaintanceship which soon began to exercise 
 unbounded influence over the mind of Lord 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 275 
 
 John Howard. Like most persons of stu- 
 dious and retiring habits, he was captivated 
 by the frank and reckless character of the 
 wild American. The liveliness of the Duke 
 of Attleborough had long excited a stronger 
 affection in his heart towards his sprightly 
 cousin than he felt for those members of his 
 family whose habits were more congenial with 
 his own; and Cleveland possessed an addi- 
 tional charm, in the boldness of speech en- 
 gendered by the fierce encounter of profes- 
 sional perils. He was princely, too, in his 
 habits of life; and the avowed scorn of aris- 
 tocratic distinctions, which in an Englishman 
 might have been attributed to impatience of 
 his own obscurity, appeared in him a national 
 virtue. 
 
 By common consent, they pursued their tour 
 together ; and before they reached Italy, 
 Cleveland had established himself in that 
 position of authority, which, even among the 
 
276 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 civilized, so often attends mere physical supe- 
 riority. 
 
 Eminently handsome, his contempt of fa- 
 tigue and danger was such as to excite the 
 admiration even of two young Englishmen, 
 habituated from their birth to manly exer- 
 cises. Hardy as a mountaineer, his athletic 
 frame appeared untirable ; and in crossing the 
 Tyrol at a season so unfavourable to the 
 passage, he had more than one occasion of 
 putting to proof those Herculean powers, 
 which served to redeem his singularly daring 
 and reckless tone from all suspicion of brag- 
 gartry. 
 
 By Fairfax, meanwhile, the deference gra- 
 dually conceded by his pupil to the showy 
 stranger, was regarded with some degree of 
 mistrust. He did not like to find Lord John 
 accord such unlimited confidence to a man 
 of whose antecedents they were wholly igno- 
 rant, and though the grave scholar was far 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 277 
 
 from inaccessible to the attraction of Cleve- 
 land's dashing and brilliant hardihood, he 
 was incapable of conferring his personal re- 
 gard in exchange for qualities which, though 
 calculated to dazzle a barbarian, were un- 
 worthy to influence an enlightened man. 
 Unwilling, however, to oppose his amiable 
 young friend in the sole predilection of which 
 he had shown himself susceptible beyond the 
 pale of his own family, he consented to their 
 joining company on the road, and proceeding 
 together to Venice. 
 
 If the whole truth must be told, there was 
 something almost as distasteful to him in the 
 meek indolence of the beautiful Mrs Cleve- 
 land, as in the careless vivacity of her hus- 
 band; and he almost regretted the commu- 
 nicativeness of the Frankfort banker which, 
 by re-uniting the cousins, had introduced so 
 unsatisfactory an addition to the calm fireside 
 beside which he had trusted to resume his 
 studies with his promising disciple. 
 
278 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 CHAP TEE XV. 
 
 And up and down the light canals they go, 
 And under the Rialto shoot along. 
 
 BYRON. 
 
 ARRIVED at Venice, however, the ocean- 
 girt city, 
 
 Lone sitting by the shore of old Romance, 
 
 Fairfax became for a time too susceptible to 
 the magical influence of the place, to take 
 much heed of that of Colonel Cleveland. 
 
 It was not in his nature to visit the ara- 
 besque city of the Adriatic, as it is visited 
 by those fashionable tourists who, under the 
 guidance of a valet de place, stare at the 
 Bridge of Sighs, jostle in the Piazza di 
 San Marco, scamper through the Palladian 
 Churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and the 
 Redentore or the Saracenic splendours of 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 279 
 
 St Mark, and up or down the Scala del 
 Giganti; swim in a gondola, yawn in a bal- 
 cony over the Canal Grande, laugh at the 
 quaint draperies of Paul Veronese, buy a bead 
 necklace, complain of the monotony of Venice ; 
 and after three days of excitement and one 
 of ennui, return grumbling to Fusina. 
 
 Fairfax busied himself in examining not 
 alone the heterogeneous details of its varied 
 architecture and neglected galleries, but the 
 unexplored treasures of its convent libra- 
 ries, and those inestimable collections of 
 the Eepublic, contained in the Biblioteca of 
 the Piazzetta. While Cleveland and his 
 young friends amused themselves (their cus- 
 tom ever of an afternoon), with a gallop along 
 the Lido di Palestrina, or by a swimming 
 match at noonday from the remote island of 
 Torcello, Fairfax pursued his historical inves- 
 tigations at the Arsenal, or amid the cabinets 
 of the ancient palaces of Gradenigo, Cornaro, 
 Pesaro, or Foscari. 
 
280 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 One of the most interesting expeditions he 
 had projected was to the Armenian convent 
 on the island of San Lazzaro, endeared of late 
 years by association with Byron to all English 
 travellers. But to his infinite mortification, 
 Lord John excused himself from bearing him 
 company ; and poor Fairfax felt lonely and de- 
 solate enough, winding in his lonely barque 
 past the Isola della Zueca towards the Mechi- 
 tarestical monastery. It was not till he 
 found himself actually in presence of the 
 librarian, Don Pasquale, that the collection 
 he came to visit resumed due importance 
 in his eyes. 
 
 Scarcely, however, had he entered the 
 library, when his attention was arrested by 
 the appearance of an English traveller, to 
 whom one of the Armenian brotherhood was 
 exhibiting a MS. of Castiglione. 
 
 " Have I really the happiness of greeting 
 you on the shores of the Adriatic ! " cried 
 Fairfax, laying his hand affectionately, after 
 
PEERS AND PARYENUS. 281 
 
 a momentary survey, on the shoulder of the 
 stranger; and the smile and deep suffusion 
 of countenance which followed this first start- 
 ling surprise, guaranteed that the happiness 
 was reciprocal. For it was no other than the 
 Fairford youth who was doing homage to the 
 treasures of the Armenian library ! 
 
 " I had not the least idea of your being in 
 Italy ! " said Cleve, after their mutual ex- 
 clamations and salutations were exhausted. 
 " When you quitted England, I understood 
 that Dresden or Vienna was to be your mark 
 for the winter ? " 
 
 " We propose visiting Vienna on our way 
 home, after a tour in Greece and to Constan- 
 tinople." 
 
 " Then our plans will most likely bring 
 us a second time together ! " replied Cleve. 
 " I purpose visiting Greece next spring, 
 after passing the winter at Kome." 
 
 " Are we to lose you, then, so soon? The 
 Duke of Attleborough and some friends with 
 
282 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 whom we have been travelling, are to set off 
 next week for Rome, in apprehension of being 
 stopped by the snow." 
 
 " It was my plan to remain a fortnight 
 longer in Venice," said Cleve. " A single 
 man, with little baggage and no equipage, 
 gets on where greater men are obstructed. 
 Enchanted with this captivating city, I have 
 no desire to move." 
 
 Fairfax avowed his delight at this in- 
 telligence. " I have been sadly wanting a 
 companion like yourself to enjoy these things 
 with me ! " said he, glancing round the 
 magnificent collection amid which they were 
 standing. 
 
 " But Lord John, where is Lord John?" 
 inquired Cleve, beginning to suspect that 
 some change had taken place in the rela- 
 tive position of Fairfax and his pupil. 
 
 " Riding on the Lido, I fancy, with his 
 cousin, and the friends of whom I was 
 speaking. At present he is under the spell 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 283 
 
 of enchantment of which most people are 
 conscious on their first visit to Venice. But 
 when that and the fascination of Colonel 
 Cleveland's society have lost their power, he 
 will return to our quiet pursuits, and we 
 shall pass a pleasant winter. Lord Wrexhill 
 is anxious his son should devote the next six 
 months to Italian and German literature ; 
 and here, we are sure of the best professors 
 and quietest leisure." 
 
 "You make me envy you!" observed 
 Cleve. " Had I anything less than the Vati- 
 can in prospect, you would almost persuade 
 me to resign the yellow Tiber for the purple 
 Brenta." 
 
 Having deliberately completed their in- 
 vestigation of the rich treasury of learning 
 open to their inspection, they dismissed one 
 of the gondolas in waiting, and returned to- 
 gether to the city. 
 
 It was a clear, sparkling November day 
 (how unlike the murky season which the 
 
284 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 name of that detested month recals to every 
 English imagination) and a sharp ripple 
 on the waters crested here aud there with 
 foam, imparted to the Canal Grande that 
 sea-green tone which its waters are made to 
 wear in the paintings of Canaletto. 
 
 " Is not this the realization of a picture ? " 
 said Fairfax, as their gondola shot past the 
 landing stairs of many an antiquated palace, 
 dignified with marble and degraded by 
 decay. 
 
 " Say rather, the verification of a ro- 
 mance," replied Cleve. " What associations, 
 too, for every English mind ! As illustra- 
 tors of Venice, to Shakspeare, Otway, Lady 
 Mary Wortley Montagu, and Monk Lewis, 
 we have now added Byron and Bonington ; 
 and Shy lock and Othello, Pierre and the 
 Bravo, seem positively more present with 
 one, than these lean and hungry gondolieri; 
 who, instead of favouring us with stanzas 
 from Tasso, as I expected, are mute as the 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 285 
 
 fishes of the deep. But is not that the How- 
 ard livery yonder on the landing-place ? 
 How strange it looks amid the dull dinginess 
 of the Venetian boatmen ! Here, then, I bid 
 you adieu for the present," he continued, 
 heartily shaking his friend by the hand, as 
 they reached the marble steps of Santa Maria 
 della Salute, and the gondolieri rested on 
 their oars. 
 
 "Farewell, till to-morrow," replied Fair- 
 fax. "I wish I had not promised Lord 
 John to accompany him to Count Nadasdy's 
 to-night." 
 
 " To the governor's ? I am to meet you 
 there ! " replied Cleve. " I brought letters 
 from Cambridge to professor Stohl, who is 
 to present me to-night to the count. " 
 
 "Can we not go together?" inquired 
 Fairfax, eager to see the most of one so much 
 more congenial to his tastes, than the pre- 
 sent companions and favourites of Lord 
 John. 
 
286 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 "I fear not. The professor, who is a 
 veteran of eighty, retires an hour earlier 
 than your aristocratic friends will make their 
 appearance. He is a privileged man, it 
 seems, with his excellency. But, encouraged 
 by the hope of your coming, I will remain 
 after his departure." 
 
 To this promise he adhered. The gray- 
 haired professor, a proteg'e of Napoleon, up- 
 held by his high reputation as a natural philo- 
 sopher in his professorial chair, even under 
 the leaden influence of the sceptre of Austria, 
 made his sober appearance in the circle of 
 white and light blue uniforms surrounding 
 the well-padded and highly-aiguletted gover- 
 nor, just long enough to present the young 
 English savant to the notice of the represen- 
 tative of his illiterate imperial master. But 
 after his departure, Cleve lingered behind, 
 under the patronage of a Bohemian count, 
 an aide-de-camp, particularly anxious to 
 exhibit to the courtly crew his proficiency 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 287 
 
 in the English language ; who, with the aid 
 of the dozen words he was able to mispro- 
 nounce, managed to present Milor Cliff to one 
 or two of the leading beauties of Venice ; who 
 were as agreeably surprised by the lingua Tos- 
 cana in bocca Eomana of the young English- 
 man, as Milor Cliff by the singular English 
 put forth by the young Graf von Duretzstein. 
 It depends upon a woman to make the 
 man with whom she is conversing feel at 
 home, even in the strangest and most un- 
 familiar circle ; and stationed beside the chair 
 of the young and lovely Countess Maria 
 Michelozzi, (a noble lady of Udine, in the 
 habit of passing the winter season at Ve- 
 nice,) Cleve soon found himself as in the 
 company of a friend. The lady of the Adri- 
 atic had so many questions to ask of the 
 progress of English literature, of Byron's 
 daughter, of Shelley's widow, as well as of 
 the state of the arts and sciences in Great 
 Britain (questions which an Englishwoman 
 
288 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 seldom finds courage to address to an enlight- 
 ened foreigner visiting her native country,) 
 that her companion soon felt on the happiest 
 terms with himself and her. 
 
 Attributing the condescension of the coun- 
 tess solely to the distinguished manner in 
 which he had been announced by the vene- 
 rable professor to his excellency, little did he 
 suspect the weight which many a fair rival 
 and jealous admirer of the fair Michelozzi 
 was disposed to assign to the personal attrac- 
 tions of one of the handsomest Englishmen 
 who had as yet pretended to the smiles of 
 the dark-eyed dames of Venice. 
 
 The highly intellectual countenance of 
 Jervis Cleve possessed a peculiar charm for 
 people whose eyes are so early and ad- 
 mirably schooled as the Venetians to ap- 
 preciate the picturesque in art or nature. 
 The subdued tone of their dress, usually 
 black, and never exhibiting anything ap- 
 proaching a gaudy colour, lends twofold 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 289 
 
 value to the expression of the human face 
 divine. In France and England, the gay 
 costume of a reigning beauty is her own 
 rival ; dividing with her person and coun- 
 tenance the notice of the spectators. But 
 in the best circles of Venice, bright eyes 
 and beaming smiles have nothing to fear 
 from the contending brilliancy of rubies and 
 diamonds. After the first year of married 
 life, the fair patrician of the Brenta lays 
 aside her jewels and gorgeous apparel ; and 
 either charms by her natural loveliness, or 
 resigns all expectation of charming. 
 
 By persons thus chastened into refine- 
 ment of taste, it was impossible for the 
 striking beauty of Cleve to be overlooked; 
 and he was pursuing his conversation with 
 the Countess Maria, encouraged by her ra- 
 diant glances, when the Duke of Attle- 
 borough and his party entered the room. 
 
 " You are acquainted with your country- 
 men?" demanded the countess, perceiving 
 
 VOL. I. 
 
290 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 the eyes of Cleve directed towards the two 
 cousins, whom he saw for the first time 
 attired in the uniform of Lord Wrexhill's 
 yeomanry cavalry. 
 
 " I have the honour to know them 
 slightly," said Cleve. 
 
 " The young man who accompanies them 
 I conclude, from the gravity of his cus- 
 tume, to be a savant like yourself ? " in- 
 quired the lady. 
 
 " Mr Fairfax is a man of great learning, 
 with whom I cannot presume to compare 
 myself," was the modest reply of her com- 
 panion. 
 
 " You are right there is no comparison 
 "between you!" replied the countess, with a 
 smile so arch, that Cleve fancied it to be 
 ironical. " I never saw him with them 
 in their riding parties ? They are generally 
 accompanied by a nobleman who attracts 
 great attention here by the splendour of 
 his equipages, and whom people persist in 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 291 
 
 calling an American, though they see him 
 so perfectly polished in his manners and 
 fair in his complexion." 
 
 " Are Americans usually otherwise?" de- 
 manded Cleve, with great simplicity, really 
 inquiring for information. 
 
 " Nay, with all your reading and infor- 
 mation, you must know better than I do ! 
 But surely, in books of travels we find 
 the people of America described as copper- 
 coloured, and habited in blankets or skins?" 
 
 Though aware that he must not expect 
 to find, in even the best continental society, 
 the intellectual cultivation of his own, 
 Cleve was not prepared for such a remark 
 from the lips of one who could appreciate 
 Shelley and Byron, and was interested in 
 tunnels and railroads. But his amazement 
 was soon suspended by the hearty salutations 
 of the Duke of Attleborough ; who hurried 
 through his compliments to Count Nadasdy 
 in order to shake hands with his college 
 
292 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 friend. Howard, too, was soon by their 
 side. 
 
 " To think that i we three ' should 'meet 
 again 7 at a thousand miles distance from 
 the old cloisters!" said the duke; " two of 
 us having exchanged our rusty array of 
 scholarship for scarlet coats ; while you, 
 my dear Cleve, are promoted from being 
 the darling of old Tangent into the cavaliere 
 of the fairest countess of Venice. Present 
 me, pray, to your lovely friend, and I will 
 do you as good a service in return." 
 
 Without inquiring into the nature of the 
 promised return, Cleve obtained the coun- 
 tess's permission to comply with the request ; 
 and Attleborough was soon so engrossed in 
 conversation with the Dalmatian beauty, 
 (who, though she knew not the difference 
 between aboriginal and colonial Americans, 
 could prattle very prettily of music, the 
 drama, and the galleries and school of Ve- 
 nice,) as apparently to have forgotten his 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 293 
 
 promise. When lo ! suddenly snatching the 
 arm of a young man in a rich foreign 
 uniform, who was passing near them, his 
 head averted in conversation with an Aus- 
 trian officer, the duke exclaimed, " Here ! 
 Cleveland, my dear fellow! let me intro- 
 duce to you an English friend of mine, 
 Mr Jervis Cleve." 
 
 Ere, however, the duke could complete 
 the introduction by naming Colonel Cleve- 
 land to Jervis, the latter turned abruptly 
 round, his fine face darkened by an ex- 
 pression of mingled amazement and mis- 
 trust. It was only when his eyes fell 
 upon the mild expressive countenance of 
 the young man presented to his notice, 
 that he recovered his self-possession ; and 
 with a courteous bow, commenced the usual 
 routine inquiries of " Have you been long 
 in Venice? Are you much gratified by what 
 you have at present seen of Italy?" 
 
 The previous explanations of the countess 
 
 02 
 
294 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 meanwhile had satisfied the curiosity of 
 Jervis touching his new acquaintance ; or 
 his interest could not but have been ex- 
 cited by his peculiarity of air and tone. 
 There was something almost barbaresque 
 in the abruptness and recklessness of the 
 handsome Cleveland ; explicable enough by 
 the fact that he had held a command in 
 the Mexican army during the war of Inde- 
 pendence. Though English in his garb and 
 language, he could not easily have been mis- 
 taken for the native of any European country. 
 
 They had been engaged nearly ten minutes 
 in conversation, (the simplicity of Cleve 
 having in that short period revealed to 
 his transatlantic friend that he was a Cam- 
 bridge scholar, travelling at the cost of the 
 university,) when the countess having risen 
 and removed to another part of the saloon, 
 the Duke of Attleborough was once more 
 at liberty to join his young friends. 
 
 " I promised Cleve, just now, my dear 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 295 
 
 fellow," said he, addressing Cleveland, "to 
 requite his service in presenting me to the 
 handsomest Italian donna in the room, by 
 doing as much in his favour with the 
 loveliest American. Where is Mrs Cleve- 
 land?" 
 
 " Virginia? On my life, I can scarcely 
 tell you. At the Fenice, I fancy. I dined 
 out." 
 
 " Then you know less of her than I do; 
 for I can assure you she is either here 
 or coming. " 
 
 Cleveland looked neither surprised nor 
 pleased. But the duke at that moment dis- 
 cerning the lady in question standing pro- 
 minent among a group of dark Venetians, 
 took the arm of Jervis Cleve and impelled 
 him in that direction. 
 
 Nothing could be more graceful and 
 gracious than the reception bestowed upon 
 the new-comer. Unaware how little com- 
 munication is kept up between the opposite 
 
296 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 sexes at a Venetian conversazione, where 
 the prudery of the surface might induce 
 a shrewd observer to conjecture the cor- 
 ruption of manners concealed beneath, she 
 entered cheerfully into conversation with 
 Cleve and his friend, unconscious of the 
 comments her evident desire to please was 
 exciting among her companions. 
 
 Philip Fairfax, who was pursuing at the 
 further extremity of the saloon, an interest- 
 ing conversation with the Benzonis and a 
 group of Venetian acquaintances, could not 
 resist fixing, from time to time, his scruti- 
 nizing glances upon the group. Familiarized 
 by his residence at Wrexhill Abbey with 
 the best order of female society in England, 
 he was not easily dazzled by mere extrin- 
 sic charms. The sterling excellence of his 
 own mother, the gentle qualities of her two 
 pupils, the high-breeding and varied ac- 
 complishments of Lady Julia and Lady Helena 
 Howard, rendered him fastidious, too fasti- 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 297 
 
 dious, perhaps, in his judgments upon women. 
 Meekness of manner did not impose upon 
 him as a proof of amiability. There was a 
 meanness, he sometimes thought, in the hu- 
 mility with which Mrs Cleveland submitted 
 to the slights of her husband ; and hypo- 
 crisy in the ready smile with which she 
 welcomed the courtesies of indifferent persons, 
 at moments when, had she been a woman 
 of feeling, her heart must have been breaking. 
 Still, he was forced to admit that it was 
 hypercritical to quarrel with excess of gen- 
 tleness and wife-like devotion. He scarcely 
 even liked to express his mistrust in pre- 
 sence of Howard. At Lord John's age, it 
 was erring on the right side to become the 
 dupe of specious appearances. The incre- 
 dulity begotten by long experience of the 
 hollowness of the world, is at least accom- 
 panied by the sagacity that discovers secret 
 virtues beneath the roughest surface, as 
 precious mines are detected by the initi- 
 
298 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 ated in the most seeming barren districts. 
 Whereas those who begin life with mistrust- 
 ing their fellow-creatures, usually end by 
 deserving their mistrust. 
 
 Even in Cleve, whom he regarded with 
 the love and pride of a brother, Fairfax was 
 not anxious to excite too active a spirit of 
 investigation into the motives and manners 
 of society. He was conscious that his own 
 scepticism was a source of misery. Thrown 
 at an early age upon his own resources, and 
 deprived by his mother's position in Lord 
 Hillingdon's family of the benefit of her ma- 
 ternal counsels, he had been sharpened into 
 worldly wisdom by collision with the rubs 
 of life. But the loss of his illusions was the 
 loss of happiness ; and in deliberating on 
 the future prospects of his young friends, 
 Lord John whose fortunes were secured and 
 Cleve whose fortunes were to be of his own 
 fashioning, his wishes on one point were alike 
 for both, i.e. that the veil might be gently 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 299 
 
 withdrawn from their eyes, not rent in twain 
 so as never again to interpose its softening 
 influence between their disappointed eyes 
 and the harsh realities of life. 
 
 The heart leaps up when we behold 
 A rainbow in the sky ; 
 
 and though we regard it with deeper reve- 
 rence when knowledge has unfolded to our 
 eyes the insubstantial nature of the optical 
 delusion, the heart rebounds no longer at 
 the sight. 
 
 The tree of knowledge has been plucked all's known ! 
 
 We neither hunger nor thirst after the fruit 
 which we have tasted, and found bitter- 
 ness at the core ! 
 
 Fairfax was careful, therefore, over the 
 expressions of his feelings when, the follow- 
 ing day, Jervis burst into rhapsodies upon 
 the beauty of the transatlantic fair. 
 
 " Yes ! Mrs Cleveland is vastly pretty ; 
 only pretty, however." 
 
300 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 " Only pretty ! Is not that enough for 
 the mere spectator ? I hate to hear perso- 
 nal loveliness underrated. We wish to look 
 upon a beautiful picture, a fine statue " 
 
 " As an effort of art, as a specimen of 
 the creative powers of a human being." 
 
 " No of the imitative. We admire these 
 efforts in proportion as they are true to na- 
 ture, and nature in proportion as she pro- 
 duces a chef-d'oeuvre" 
 
 " You see with the eyes and argue with 
 the lips of one-and-twenty !" replied Fair- 
 fax with a smile. " Ask Colonel Cleveland 
 what influence is exercised over his mind 
 by the charms of his wife. Ask me what 
 emotion I experience while I am gazing on 
 Mrs Cleveland!" 
 
 " I shall ask neither of you. Beauty in 
 the eyes of a husband, and beauty in the 
 eyes of a poet, are very different things. 
 But I should despise myself as much for 
 indifference to beauty in a woman, as in 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 301 
 
 a fine landscape or noble specimen of archi- 
 tecture." 
 
 " So far I applaud you ! " replied Fair- 
 fax, smiling at his enthusiasm. " For 
 the Parthenon, or Yale of Tempe, would 
 scarcely exercise other influence over you, 
 than as calculated to afford an agree- 
 able reminiscence. At all events, I am not 
 afraid you will go mad for the love of the 
 facade of the Procuratie nuove! So put 
 on your hat and come with me to visit it ; 
 and we will examine together the sculptures 
 of the Loggetta. " 
 
 "Go mad for love ? Why surely" cried 
 Jervis Cleve, interrupting himself, "you do 
 not for a moment fancy that this Mrs 
 Cleveland " 
 
 " I fancy nothing whatever about Mrs 
 Cleveland, except that in my opinion she 
 has occupied a larger share of our conversa- 
 tion than she deserves ! " replied Philip 
 
 Fairfax. "Let us leave her merits and de- 
 VOL. i. p 
 
302 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 merits to her spouse, to whom they lawfully 
 belong, and away to our morning's pere- 
 grinations." 
 
 "Lord John, then, is engaged to-day?" 
 inquired Cleve, following his philosophical 
 companion down the dirty marble stairs of 
 the palazzo. 
 
 " The day is fine. He is gone to the Lido 
 with the duke. The Clevelands and his grace 
 remain here only ten days longer. Till their 
 departure, I shall not thwart Lord John 
 by urging the prosecution of our intended 
 pursuits." 
 
 And having summoned the boatmen, the 
 gondola was detached from the anchorage poles 
 fronting the palace, bearing the arms of the 
 proprietor; and stepping at once from the 
 marble vestibule into the barque floating 
 little below its level, they installed themselves 
 in the " coffin clapt in a canoe," and were 
 soon gliding swiftly under the Eialto towards 
 their destination. 
 
PEERS AND PARVENUS. 303 
 
 Happy was it for Jervis Cleve that he 
 possessed so wise a Mentor in the only human 
 being endeared to him by the name of friend ; 
 and thrice happy that a singular concatena- 
 tion of circumstances had thus brought them 
 together, on the threshold of his entrance into 
 society. 
 
 Isolated from all ordinary ties by his 
 remarkable position, to him friendship was 
 necessary, to supply the support usually yielded 
 by family affection. Unable to derive counsel, 
 like other young men, from his nearest 
 kindred, he must create for himself those 
 interests in life of which education had ren- 
 dered him bankrupt. 
 
 He might appeal by letter, indeed, to the 
 tenderness of Jenny ; or beseech the bene- 
 diction of aunt Morris and her poor old 
 brother, as consolations for his lonely career. 
 But it was from aliens he must receive the 
 restraining suggestion, the wise remon- 
 strance, involving those distinctions of arti- 
 
304 PEERS AND PARVENUS. 
 
 ficial life, which only a hermit or a blockhead 
 presumes to despise. 
 
 Nor were the restraining suggestion and 
 wise remonstrance likely to be superfluous. 
 The frivolous dissipations of an Attleborough 
 or a Joddrell are in fact less vitally influen- 
 tial over the character, than the deep-seated 
 passions of a soul such as that of Cleve; as 
 the waters which sparkle in fountains and 
 jets d'eau, possess less force than a pent and 
 struggling stream. 
 
 Proof against vulgar irregularities, the 
 young scholar felt a monitor to be unne- 
 cessary, only because at present ignorant 
 under how specious an aspect may present 
 themselves 
 
 " Those thousand paths that slope the way to crime ! " 
 END OF VOL. I. 
 
 REYNELL and WEIGHT, Little Pulteney street. 
 
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