Alured de Pentonville, eighteenth Earl of Bagnigge, Viscount Paon of Islington, Baron Pancras, Kingscross, and a Baronet, was, like too many of our young men of ton, utterly blase, although only in his twenty-fourth year.  Blest, luckily, with a mother of excellent principles (who had imbued his young mind with that Morality which is so superior to all the vain pomps of the world!) it had not been always the young earl’s lot to wear the coronet for which he now in sooth cared so little.  His father, a captain of Britain’s navy, struck down by the side of the gallant Collingwood in the Bay of Fundy, left little but his sword and spotless name to his young, lovely, and inconsolable widow, who passed the first years of her mourning in educating her child in an elegant though small cottage in one of the romantic marine villages of beautiful Devonshire.  Her child!  What a gush of consolation filled the widow’s heart as she pressed him to it!  How faithfully did she instil into his young bosom those principles which had been the pole-star of the existence of his gallant father!

In this secluded retreat, rank and wealth almost boundless found the widow and her boy.  The seventeenth Earl—­gallant and ardent, and in the prime of youth—­went forth one day from the Eternal City to a steeple-chase in the Campagna.  A mutilated corpse was brought back to his hotel in the Piazza di Spagna.  Death, alas! is no respecter of the Nobility.  That shattered form was all that remained of the fiery, the haughty, the wild, but the generous Altamont de Pentonville!  Such, such is fate!

The admirable Emily de Pentonville trembled with all a mother’s solicitude at the distinctions and honors which thus suddenly descended on her boy.  She engaged an excellent clergyman of the Church of England to superintend his studies; to accompany him on foreign travel when the proper season arrived; to ward from him those dangers which dissipation always throws in the way of the noble, the idle, and the wealthy.  But the Reverend Cyril Delaval died of the measles at Naples, and henceforth the young Earl of Bagnigge was without a guardian.

What was the consequence?  That, at three-and-twenty, he was a cynic and an epicure.  He had drained the cup of pleasure till it had palled in his unnerved hand.  He had looked at the Pyramids without awe, at the Alps without reverence.  He was unmoved by the sandy solitudes of the Desert as by the placid depths of Mediterranean’s sea of blue.  Bitter, bitter tears did Emily de Pentonville weep, when, on Alured’s return from the Continent, she beheld the awful change that dissipation had wrought in her beautiful, her blue-eyed, her perverted, her still beloved boy!

“Corpo di Bacco,” he said, pitching the end of his cigar on to the red nose of the Countess of Delawaddymore’s coachman—­who, having deposited her fat ladyship at No. 236 Piccadilly, was driving the carriage to the stables, before commencing his evening at the “Fortune of War” public-house—­“what a lovely creature that was!  What eyes! what hair!  Who knows her?  Do you, mon cher prince?”