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lips of the dumb. He was now a great speaker in the House, and a great talker out of it: but, alas! he would persist in speechifying where he was only wanted to talk! I know not what he did when wanted to speak, except draw down the cheers of the ministerial benches, as the newspapers daily reported ;—but in company he was a bore.

Having once assumed the ministerial plural, he talked Gargantuaciously, like a man talking for his party. "WE think,"-"WE intend"— "OUR policy in the East"-" OUR South American negociations"-sounded in the mouth of Herries as multivocal as the "MarchonsCombattons!" of the chorus at the French opera, or the " Qual orror!" of Otello.

I never liked him when he was singular,-I hated him in the plural; and had hardly patience to hear him dogmatizing at my brother's table,-giving out his platitudes as if decisive as Papal Bulls, because the "we" by which they were fulminated had the authority of the

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Gazette; while Danby sat by, a patient auditor, with those wise meanings reflected in his quiet

eye,

which his dictatorial brother-in-law allowed

no opportunity to issue from his lips.

For Danby was one, in all the events of life, too wise to contend against the force of circumstances. The secret of true greatness consists in the power of so calculating the concomitants of our position, as to attempt nothing where defeat is probable.-Where is the use of arguing against a man who silences your logic with the thunders of Government authority?-as well attempt to answer the fire of a battery of four and twenty pounders, with a discharge of Oriental pearls!

My brother seldom rose now in Parliament; and the Tory party regarded him as, if not a traitor, an unavailable adherent. On all major points, he voted with the party; and now and then, on the agitation of a question regarding the maintenance of the constitution, upheld the venerable banner with all the vigour of his

powerful arm, by one of those mild and expostulative speeches which are the eloquence of the wise. It was "la raison avec son filet de voix"-but the golden thread is of firmer texture than the hempen cable.

Notwithstanding my esteem for Danby, however, there was so little in common between us, that I resorted to his society almost as rarely as to the dreary old house in Hanover Square. He was what is called "lost to the world," that is, too much absorbed by the world to come. His daughter was growing up. Jane had now attained the age when the dawn of human character casts its golden light before; and Danby saw, or fancied he saw, in the soil turned up by the plough and harrow of the governess, a field worthy of higher cultivation. Such was thenceforward the object of his life. I often noticed to him that Jane was strikingly pretty but if her father saw in her the making of an angel, it was not an angel of the species which St. James's Street calls angelic.

All philosophers, they say, have an Utopia, in which they invest the romance (which they call wisdom) of their minds. Danby's Utopia was concentrated in the nature of his child. In her, he hoped to exemplify his idea of excellence and good government; and of a surety, the feminine virtues of her mother, the manly sense of her father, if combined in due proportions, were likely to produce a woman such as these our times have rarely worshipped.

My angels, meanwhile, were of a very different calibre; and it was like emerging out of the solemn aisles of Westminster Abbey on a sunshiny afternoon into the stir and bustle of Palace Yard, whenever I quitted the argumentative dinner table in Connaught Place for those gaudy scenes, the excitement of which was becoming essential to my existence.

Happiness is a good thing after forty;-till then, Pleasure is a pleasanter. At twenty, thirty was my date for growing soberly happy; but when thirty arrived, I knew better.

At thirty-five, about the date of which I am writing, I was less certain. In spite of Delcroix, or rather perhaps thanks to Delcroix, there were certain puckerings near the eyes, certain silvery threads perceptible among the curls of Cecil Danby, which would have betrayed themselves to any other eyes than those of Mariana, and which rendered me somewhat suspicious that the time was at hand when I should cease to charm; and, consequently, when a perpetual tinkling of cymbals might cease to charm me.

There was no use in forestalling the epoch. After all, philosophy may do its best to refine our minds, or utilitarianism to vulgarize them, but there is nothing more joyous, so long as the pulse beats high and the nerves remain firmly strung, than the existence whose sunshine is candlelight,-whose nightingales are opera singers,-whose nectar, Sillery, - whose ambrosia, bastions de volaille! All the poetry of civilized life condenses itself into such a

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