and cast many a look of mingled regret and hope to Bois de Duc, Avignon, and Italy. [Where the Chevalier Saint George, or, as he was termed, the Old Pretender, held his exiled court, as his situation compelled him to shift his place of residence.] The accession of the near relation of one of those steady and inflexible opponents was considered as a means of bringing over more converts, and therefore Richard Waverley met with a share of ministerial favour more than proportioned to his talents or his political importance.  It was however, discovered that he had respectable talents for public business, and the first admittance to the minister’s levee being negotiated, his success became rapid.  Sir Everard learned from the public news-letter,—­first, that Richard Waverley, Esquire, was returned for the ministerial borough of Barterfaith; next, that Richard Waverley, Esquire, had taken a distinguished part in the debate upon the Excise bill in the support of government; and, lastly, that Richard Waverley, Esquire, had been honoured with a seat at one of those boards, where the pleasure of serving the country is combined with other important gratifications, which, to render them the more acceptable, occur regularly once a quarter.

Although these events followed each other so closely that the sagacity of the editor of a modern newspaper would have presaged the last two even while he announced the first, yet they came upon Sir Everard gradually, and drop by drop, as it were, distilled through the cool and procrastinating alembic of DYER’S weekly letter. [Long the oracle of the country gentlemen of the high Tory party.  The ancient news-letter was written in manuscript and copied by clerks, who addressed the copies to the subscribers.  The politician by whom they were compiled picked up his intelligence at coffee-houses, and often pleaded for an additional gratuity, in consideration of the extra expense attached to frequenting such places of fashionable resort.] For it may be observed in passing, that instead of those mail-coaches, by means of which every mechanic at his sixpenny club may nightly learn from twenty contradictory channels the yesterday’s news of the capital, a weekly post brought, in those days, to Waverley-Honour, a weekly intelligencer, which, after it had gratified Sir Everard’s curiosity, his sister’s, and that of his aged butler, was regularly transferred from the Hall to the Rectory, from the Rectory to Squire Stubbs’ at the Grange, from the Squire to the Baronet’s steward at his neat white house on the heath, from the steward to the bailiff, and from him through a huge circle of honest dames and gaffers, by whose hard and horny hands it was generally worn to pieces in about a month after its arrival.