Such is the stain which burns red on the Shirley shield, and such was the man who placed it there.  But, as we have seen, Laurence Shirley was mad beyond all doubt, and “knew not what he did”; and in the eyes of all charitable and right-thinking men the ’scutcheon of the Ferrers Earldom remains as virtually unsullied to-day as when it was virginally fresh two centuries ago.

CHAPTER V

A GHOSTLY VISITANT

There is scarcely a chapter in the story of the British Peerage more tragic and mysterious than that which chronicles the closing days of Thomas, second Lord Lyttelton, whose dissolute life had its fitting climax of horror at the exact moment foretold to him by a ghostly visitor.  Various and somewhat conflicting accounts are given of this singular tragedy; but in them all the chief incidents stand out so clear and unassailable that even such a hard-headed sceptic as Dr Johnson declared, “I am so glad to have evidence of the spiritual world that I am willing to believe it.”

Thomas, second Lord Lyttelton, son of the first Baron, the distinguished poet and historian, was the degenerate descendant of five centuries of Lyttelton ancestors, who had held their heads among the highest in the county of Worcester since the days of the third Henry.  Unlike his clean-living forefathers, he was famous as a debauchee in a dissolute age.

“Of his morals,” Sir Bernard Burke says, “we may judge by the fact of his having died the victim of the coarsest debauchery, and leaving behind him a diary more disgustingly licentious than the pages of Aratine himself.”

William Coombe, who had been at Eton with Lyttelton, is said to have had his old schoolfellow in mind when he dedicated his Diaboliad “to the worst man in His Majesty’s Dominions,” and when he penned those terrible lines:—­

    “Have I not tasted every villain’s part? 
     Have I not broke a noble parent’s heart? 
     Do I not daily boast how I betrayed
     The tender widow and the virtuous maid?”

From the days when he wore his Eton jacket the life of this perverse lord seems to have been one long record of profligacy; at least, until that day, but six years before its end, when, to quote his own words, “I awoke, and behold I was a lord!”

“From the time when,” Mr Stanley Makower writes, “although no more than a youth of nineteen, his engagement to General Warburton’s daughter had been broken off on the discovery of the vicious life he had led in his travels in France and Italy, he had been a source of shame and trouble to his family....  To measure the depths of Lyttelton’s vices, it is necessary to read his own letters, in which the literary style is as perfect as the fearless admission of fault is bewildering.”

Indeed, even more remarkable than the viciousness of his life, was the brazen openness with which he flaunted it in the face of the world.