official life. Frank, the ornamental one of the family, had literally nothing to trust to, in order to maintain the extravagant habits he was acquiring in his present appointment. Neither he nor I, however, judged it necessary to be further sighted than his family and friends-He was the pet of the court while in waiting, and the darling of the Exclusives when out of waiting; and never did I see a young fellow so general a favourite. He was merry without being noisy. A gleam of perpetual sunshine brightened his joyous eye; or if clouded by the moisture of a passing tear, the rainbow created by that rare refraction was indeed an emblem of peace. Man, woman, or child, no one was proof against the fascinations of Frank ! -- He had but one fault, the consequence of this happy temperament and universal favour; -he was a Cupidon déchainé. People talk of a hard drinker, or desperate gambler,-Frank Walsingham was a hard flirter. It was no I fault of his, he was to the manner born. have shown that I reached Oxford without any thing amounting to an affaire de cœur. But I am convinced that Walsingham must have coquetted with his nurse, and scribbled billet doux on the blank leaves of his Barbauld's Lessons. Frank was as well qualified for his vocation by nature, as I, by art.-His long black lashes and large grey eyes acquired, when he chose, a look so sentimental, that in accompanying his sixpence to a beggar at the crossing with"poor woman!" or a pitiful glance, he seemed to be giving utterance to one of those exquisite sentiments seldom emitted in real life, or any where else, but the well-gilt pages of an octavo volume. Even in the days of courtship which preceded my days of courtiership, I wanted, I fear, the charming laissez aller of Walsingham. -He appeared to love for the sake only of the woman he loved,-I, for my own;-and so fervent was his ordinary manner, that he could make the agreeable quite as agreeably to half a dozen charmers in succession, as other men to the one idol at whose feet they exhale the whole incense of their soul.-Like a portrait whose eyes appear to follow the person who gazes upon it, his heart seemed always at the service of those who wished it. Because never in earnest, he always seemed so. His gallantry was purely superficial,-the result of good spirits and good humour; and thus secure from the variabilities of deeper seated emotions, was ever ready for a flight. I wonder, now, how I could be so fond of Frank, who was a phenominal reduplication of myself. Perhaps I fancied myself divested of a dozen of my superfluous years, by associating with a young fellow of twenty-two-for I was arrived at the time of life when one shrinks from the company of one's contemporaries ;— and the round shoulders of Sir Moulton Drewe, or the bald crown of Mereworth, were disagreeable remembrancers of our progress in a career, of which it cannot be said that it leaves not a wreck behind. Mereworth, by the way, attempted, after the fashion of the Cæsars, to disguise his baldness by a crown of laurels. His speeches had almost as much influence in the Upper House as my brother's in the Lower; not as being of the same quality or calibre, but because the sober, fluent, expositious manner with which long habits of official life endowed the Earl, answered better with such an auditory than more impressive bursts of eloquence. For the Peers of our time were not as the Peers of Chatham's: and the country-gentleman aristocracy looked to Mereworth as its Solon. His speeches I knew only by report,—the report of the Clubs, not reporters' report, for I am no speller of debates.-But it was by experience I found that a hogshead of heady port, such as Mereworth's light conversation, was the very thing to make one thirst for the high-flavoured Rhenish of Danby, or a glass of Frank Walsingham's sparkling Champagne.— |