This was Philip Vaughan, as people knew him in 1880.  Some liked him; some pitied him; some rather despised him; but no one took the trouble to understand him; and indeed, if anyone had thought it worth while to do so, the attempt would probably have been unsuccessful; for Vaughan never talked of the past, and to understand him in 1880 one must have known him as he had been thirty years before.

In 1850 two of the best known of the young men in society were Arthur Grey and Philip Vaughan.  They were, and had been ever since their schooldays at Harrow, inseparable friends.  The people to whom friendship is a sealed and hopeless mystery were puzzled by the alliance.  “What have those two fellows in common?” was the constant question, “and yet you never see them apart.”  They shared lodgings in Mount Street, frequented the same clubs, and went, night after night, to the same diners and balls.  They belonged, in short, to the same set:  “went everywhere,” as the phrase is, and both were extremely popular; but their pursuits and careers were different.  Grey was essentially a sportsman and an athlete.  He was one of those men to whom all bodily exercises come naturally, and who attain perfection in them with no apparent effort.  From his earliest days he had set his heart on being a soldier, and by 1850 had obtained a commission in the Guards.  Vaughan had neither gifts nor inclinations in the way of sport or games.  At Harrow he lived the life of the intellect and the spirit, and was unpopular accordingly.  He was constantly to be found “mooning,” as his schoolfellows said, in the green lanes and meadow-paths which lie between Harrow and Uxbridge, or gazing, as Byron had loved to gaze, at the sunset from the Churchyard Terrace.  It was even whispered that he wrote poetry.

Arthur Grey, with his good looks, his frank bearing, and his facile supremacy on the cricket-ground and in the racquet-court, was a popular hero; and of all his schoolfellows none paid him a more whole-hearted worship than the totally dissimilar Philip Vaughan.  Their close and intimate affection was a standing puzzle to hard and dull and superficial natures; but a poet could interpret it.

  “We trifled, toiled, and feasted, far apart
     From churls, who, wondered what our friendship meant;
   And in that coy retirement heart to heart
     Drew closer, and our natures were content."[*]

[Footnote *:  William Cory.]

Vaughan and Grey left Harrow, as they had entered it, on the same day, and in the following October both went up to Christ Church.  Neither contemplated a long stay at Oxford, for each had his career cut out.  Grey was to join the Guards at the earliest opportunity, and Vaughan was destined for Parliament.  Bilton was a borough which the “Schedule A” of 1832 had spared.  It numbered some 900 voters; and, even as the electors of Liskeard “were commonly of the same opinion as Mr. Eliot,” so the electors of Bilton were commonly of the same opinion as Lord Liscombe.