and Germans, who were stupidly playing into the hands of the Southerners, were not exactly carrying them out; but he had no mind to face either Irish or Southerners.  The former were too vulgar for his delicacy; the latter too aristocratic for his pride.  Sprung, as he held (and rightly), from as fine old English blood as any Virginian (though it did happen to be Puritan, and not Cavalier), he had no lust to come into contact with men who considered him much further below them in rank than an English footman is below an English nobleman; who, indeed, would some of them look down on the English nobleman himself as a mushroom of yesterday.  So he compounded with his conscience by ignoring the whole matter, and by looking on the state of public affairs on his side of the Atlantic with a cynicism which very soon (as is usual with rich men) passed into Epicureanism.  Poetry and music, pictures and statues, amusement and travel, became his idols, and cultivation his substitute for the plain duty of patriotism, and wandering luxuriously over the world, he learnt to sentimentalise over cathedrals and monasteries, pictures and statues, saints and kaisers, with a lazy regret that such “forms of beauty and nobleness” were no longer possible in a world of scrip and railroads:  but without any notion that it was his duty to reproduce in his own life, or that of his country, as much as he could of the said beauty and nobleness.  And now he was sorely tried.  It was interesting enough to “develop” the peculiar turn of Marie’s genius, by writing for her plays about liberty, just as he would have written plays about jealousy, or anything else for representing which she had “capabilities.”  But to be called on to act in that Slavery question, the one in which he knew (as all sensible Americans do) that the life and death of his country depended, and which for that very reason he had carefully ignored till a more convenient season, finding in its very difficulty and danger an excuse for leaving it to solve itself:—­to have this thrust on him, and by her, as the price of the thing which he must have, or die!  If she had asked for his right hand, he would have given it sooner; and he entered the Royal Academy that day in much the same humour as that of a fine lady who should find herself suddenly dragged from the ball-room into the dust-hole, in her tenderest array of gauze and jewels, and there peremptorily compelled to sift the cinders, under the superintendence of the sweep and the pot-boy.

Glad to escape from questions which he had rather not answer too soon, he went in search of Claude, and found him before one of those pre-Raphaelite pictures, which Claude does not appreciate as he ought.

“Desinit in Culicem mulier formosa superne,” said Stangrave, as he looked over Claude’s shoulder; “but I suppose he followed nature, and copied his model.”