And you need not be reminded that he has the leg without the naughtiness.  You see eminent in him what we would fain have brought about in a nation that has lost its leg in gaining a possibly cleaner morality.  And that is often contested; but there is no doubt of the loss of the leg.

Well, footmen and courtiers and Scottish Highlanders, and the corps de ballet, draymen too, have legs, and staring legs, shapely enough.  But what are they? not the modulated instrument we mean—­simply legs for leg-work, dumb as the brutes.  Our cavalier’s is the poetic leg, a portent, a valiance.  He has it as Cicero had a tongue.  It is a lute to scatter songs to his mistress; a rapier, is she obdurate.  In sooth a leg with brains in it, soul.

And its shadows are an ambush, its lights a surprise.  It blushes, it pales, can whisper, exclaim.  It is a peep, a part revelation, just sufferable, of the Olympian god—­Jove playing carpet-knight.

For the young Sir Willoughby’s family and his thoughtful admirers, it is not too much to say that Mrs. Mountstuart’s little word fetched an epoch of our history to colour the evening of his arrival at man’s estate.  He was all that Merrie Charles’s court should have been, subtracting not a sparkle from what it was.  Under this light he danced, and you may consider the effect of it on his company.

He had received the domestic education of a prince.  Little princes abound in a land of heaped riches.  Where they have not to yield military service to an Imperial master, they are necessarily here and there dainty during youth, sometimes unmanageable, and as they are bound in no personal duty to the State, each is for himself, with full present, and what is more, luxurious, prospective leisure for the practice of that allegiance.  They are sometimes enervated by it:  that must be in continental countries.  Happily our climate and our brave blood precipitate the greater number upon the hunting-field, to do the public service of heading the chase of the fox, with benefit to their constitutions.  Hence a manly as well as useful race of little princes, and Willoughby was as manly as any.  He cultivated himself, he would not be outdone in popular accomplishments.  Had the standard of the public taste been set in philosophy, and the national enthusiasm centred in philosophers, he would at least have worked at books.  He did work at science, and had a laboratory.  His admirable passion to excel, however, was chiefly directed in his youth upon sport; and so great was the passion in him, that it was commonly the presence of rivals which led him to the declaration of love.

He knew himself, nevertheless, to be the most constant of men in his attachment to the sex.  He had never discouraged Laetitia Dale’s devotion to him, and even when he followed in the sweeping tide of the beautiful Constantia Durham (whom Mrs. Mountstuart called “The Racing Cutter"), he thought of Laetitia, and looked at her.  She was a shy violet.