Before we give ear to the recital of Dr. Shrapnel’s letter to his pupil in politics by the mouth of Captain Baskelett, it is necessary to defend this gentleman, as he would handsomely have defended himself, from the charge that he entertained ultimate designs in regard to the really abominable scrawl, which was like a child’s drawing of ocean with here and there a sail capsized, and excited his disgust almost as much as did the contents his great indignation.  He was prepared to read it, and stood blown out for the task, but it was temporarily too much for him.  ’My dear Colonel, look at it, I entreat you,’ he said, handing the letter for exhibition, after fixing his eye-glass, and dropping it in repulsion.  The common sentiment of mankind is offended by heterodoxy in mean attire; for there we see the self-convicted villain—­the criminal caught in the act; we try it and convict it by instinct without the ceremony of a jury; and so thoroughly aware of our promptitude in this respect has our arch-enemy become since his mediaeval disgraces that his particular advice to his followers is now to scrupulously copy the world in externals; never to appear poorly clothed, nor to impart deceptive communications in bad handwriting.  We can tell black from white, and our sagacity has taught him a lesson.

Colonel Halkett glanced at the detestable penmanship.  Lord Palmet did the same, and cried, ‘Why, it’s worse than mine!’

Cecilia had protested against the reading of the letter, and she declined to look at the writing.  She was entreated, adjured to look, in Captain Baskelett’s peculiarly pursuing fashion; a ‘nay, but you shall,’ that she had been subjected to previously, and would have consented to run like a schoolgirl to escape from.

To resume the defence of him:  he was a man incapable of forming plots, because his head would not hold them.  He was an impulsive man, who could impale a character of either sex by narrating fables touching persons of whom he thought lightly, and that being done he was devoid of malice, unless by chance his feelings or his interests were so aggrieved that his original haphazard impulse was bent to embrace new circumstances and be the parent of a line of successive impulses, in the main resembling an extremely far-sighted plot, whereat he gazed back with fondness, all the while protesting sincerely his perfect innocence of anything of the kind.  Circumstances will often interwind with the moods of simply irritated men.  In the present instance he could just perceive what might immediately come of his reading out of this atrocious epistle wherein Nevil Beauchamp was displayed the dangling puppet of a mountebank wire-pulley, infidel, agitator, leveller, and scoundrel.  Cognizant of Mr. Romfrey’s overtures to Colonel Halkett, he traced them to that scheming woman in the house at Steynham, and he was of opinion that it was a friendly and good thing to do to let the old colonel and Cissy Halkett know Mr. Nevil through a bit of his correspondence.  This, then, was a matter of business and duty that furnished an excuse for his going out of his, way to call at Mount Laurels on the old familiar footing, so as not to alarm the heiress.