Lord Fleetwood’s yet undocked old associates vowed he ‘smelt strong’ of the fumes of the whirled silver censer-balls.  His disfavour had caused a stoppage of supplies, causing vociferous abomination of their successful rivals, the Romish priests.  Captain Abrane sniffed, loud as a horse, condemnatory as a cat, in speaking of him.  He said:  ’By George, it comes to this; we shall have to turn Catholics for a loan!’ Watchdogs of the three repeated the gigantic gambler’s melancholy roar.  And, see what gap, cried the ratiocination of alarm, see the landslip it is in our body, national and religious, when exalted personages go that way to Rome!

As you and the world have reflected in your sager moods, an ordinary pebble may roll where it likes, for individualism of the multitudinously obscure little affects us.  Not so the costly jewel, which is a congregation of ourselves, in our envies and longings and genuflexions thick about its lustres.  The lapses of precious things must needs carry us, both by weight and example, and it will ceaselessly be, that we are possessed by the treasure we possess, we hang on it.  A still, small voice of England’s mind under panic sent up these truisms containing admonitions to the governing Ladies.  They, the most conservative of earthly bodies, clamoured in return, like cloud-scud witches that have caught fire at their skirts from the torches of marsh-fire radicals.  They cited for his arrest the titled millionaire who made a slide for the idiots of the kingdom; they stigmatized our liberty as a sophistry, unless we have in it the sustaining element of justice; and where is the justice that punishes his country for any fatal course a mad young Croesus may take!  They shackled the hands of testators, who endangered the salvation of coroneted boys by having sanction to bequeath vast wealth in bulk.  They said, in truth, that it was the liberty to be un-Christian.  Finally, they screeched a petitioning of Parliament to devote a night to a sitting, and empower the Lord Chancellor to lay an embargo on the personal as well as the real estate of wealthy perverts; in common prudence depriving Rome of the coveted means to turn our religious weapons against us.

The three guardian ladies and their strings of followers headed over the fevered and benighted town, as the records of the period attest, windpiping these and similar Solan notes from the undigested cropful of alarms Lord Fleetwood’s expected conduct crammed into them.  They and all the world traced his present madness to the act foregoing:  that marriage!  They reviewed it to deplore it, every known incident and the numbers imagined; yet merely to deplore:  frightful comparisons of then with now rendered the historical shock to the marriage market matter for a sick smile.  Evil genius of some sort beside him the wealthy young nobleman is sure to have.  He has got rid of one to take up with a viler.  First, a sluttish trollop of German origin is foisted on him for life; next, he is misled to abjure the faith of his fathers for Rome.  But patently, desperation in the husband of such a wife weakened his resistance to the Roman Catholic pervert’s insinuations.  There we punctuate the full stop to our inquiries; we have the secret.