How exquisitely, now (for this is one of the rare occasions in which a man is permitted to praise himself), is established hereby an unexpected bond of linked sweetness long drawn out between things which had, ere they came beneath the magic touch of genius, no more to do with each other than this book has with the Stock Exchange.  Who would have dreamed of travelling from the Tabard in Southwark to the last new singer, via Exeter-hall and the lilies of the valley, and touching en passant on to cardinal virtues and an Irish Viscount?  But see; given only a little impudence, and less logic, and hey presto! the thing is done; and all that remains to be done is to dilate (as the Rev. Dionysius O’Blareaway would do at this stage of the process) upon the moral question which has been so cunningly raised, and to inquire, firstly,—­how the virtues of meekness and humility could be predicated of Frederick Augustus St. Just, Viscount Scoutbush and Baron Torytown, in the peerage of Ireland; and secondly,—­how those virtues were called into special action by his questionably wise attachment to a new actress, to whom he had never spoken a word in his life.

First, then, “Little Freddy Scoutbush,” as his compeers irreverently termed him, was, by common consent of her Majesty’s Guards, a “good fellow.”  Whether the St. James’ Street definition of that adjective be the perfect one or not, we will not stay to inquire; but in the Guards’ club-house it meant this:  that Scoutbush had not an enemy in the world, because he deserved none; that he lent, and borrowed not; gave, and asked not again; envied not; hustled not; slandered not; never bore malice, never said a cruel word, never played a dirty trick, would hear a fellow’s troubles out to the end, and if he could not counsel, at least would not laugh at them, and at all times and in all places lived and let live, and was accordingly a general favourite.  His morality was neither better nor worse than the average of his companions; but if he was sensual, he was at least not base; and there were frail women who blessed “little Freddy,” and his shy and secret generosity, from having saved them from the lowest pit.

Au reste, he was idle, frivolous, useless; but with these two palliating facts, that he knew it and regretted it; and that he never had a chance of being aught else.  His father and mother had died when he was a child.  He had been sent to Eton at seven, where he learnt nothing, and into the Guards at seventeen, where he learnt less than nothing.  His aunt, old Lady Knockdown, who was a kind old Irish woman, an ex-blue and ex-beauty, now a high Evangelical professor, but as worldly as her neighbours in practice, had tried to make him a good boy in old times:  but she had given him up, long before he left Eton, as a “vessel of wrath” (which he certainly was, with his hot Irish temper); and since then she had only spoken of him with moans, and to him just as if he and she had made a compact to be as worldly