“This sounds dreadfully democrat.  Pray, don’t be alarmed.  The discovery of the affinity between the two extremes of the Royal British Oak has made me thrice conservative.  I see now that the national love of a lord is less subservience than a form of self-love; putting a gold-lace hat on one’s image, as it were, to bow to it.  I see, too, the admirable wisdom of our system:—­could there be a finer balance of power than in a community where men intellectually nil, have lawful vantage and a gold-lace hat on?  How soothing it is to intellect—­that noble rebel, as the Pilgrim has it—­to stand, and bow, and know itself superior!  This exquisite compensation maintains the balance:  whereas that period anticipated by the Pilgrim, when science shall have produced an intellectual aristocracy, is indeed horrible to contemplate.  For what despotism is so black as one the mind cannot challenge?  ’Twill be an iron Age.  Wherefore, madam, I cry, and shall continue to cry, ’Vive Lord Mountfalcon! long may he sip his Burgundy! long may the bacon-fed carry him on their shoulders!’

“Mr. Morton (who does me the honour to call me Young Mephisto, and Socrates missed) leaves to-morrow to get Master Ralph out of a scrape.  Our Richard has just been elected member of a Club for the promotion of nausea.  Is he happy? you ask.  As much so as one who has had the misfortune to obtain what he wanted can be.  Speed is his passion.  He races from point to point.  In emulation of Leander and Don Juan, he swam, I hear, to the opposite shores the other day, or some world-shaking feat of the sort:  himself the Hero whom he went to meet:  or, as they who pun say, his Hero was a Bet.  A pretty little domestic episode occurred this morning.  He finds her abstracted in the fire of his caresses:  she turns shy and seeks solitude:  green jealousy takes hold of him:  he lies in wait, and discovers her with his new rival—­a veteran edition of the culinary Doctor!  Blind to the Doctor’s great national services, deaf to her wild music, he grasps the intruder, dismembers him, and performs upon him the treatment he has recommended for dressed cucumber.  Tears and shrieks accompany the descent of the gastronome.  Down she rushes to secure the cherished fragments:  he follows:  they find him, true to his character, alighted and straggling over a bed of blooming flowers.  Yet ere a fairer flower can gather him, a heel black as Pluto stamps him into earth, flowers and all:—­happy burial!  Pathetic tribute to his merit is watering his grave, when by saunters my Lord Mountfalcon.  ’What’s the mattah?’ says his lordship, soothing his moustache.  They break apart, and ’tis left to me to explain from the window.  My lord looks shocked, Richard is angry with her for having to be ashamed of himself, Beauty dries her eyes, and after a pause of general foolishness, the business of life is resumed.  I may add that the Doctor has just been dug up, and we are busy, in the enemy’s absence, renewing old Aeson with enchanted threads.  By the way, a Papist priest has blest them.”