when they prefer the request for a plateful, and commissioning their literary police to brain audacious experimenters who enlarge or wing it beyond the downright aim at that mark.  The gossip of the time must therefore appear commonplace, in resemblance to the panting venue a terre of the toad, instead of the fiery steed’s; although we have documentary evidence that our country’s heart was moved;—­in no common degree, Dr. Glossop’s lucid English has it, at the head of a broadsheet ballad discovered by him, wherein the connubially inclined young earl and the nation in turn beseech the countess to resume her place at Esslemont, and so save both from a terrific dragon’s jaw, scarlet as the infernal flames; described as fascinating—­

          ’The classes with the crests,
          And the lining to their vests,
          Till down they jump, and empty leave
          A headless trunk that rests.’

These ballads, burlesque to present reading, mainly intended for burlesque by the wits who dogged without much enlivening an anxious period of our history, when corner-stones were falling the way the young lord of the millions threatened to go, did, there is little doubt, according to another part of their design (Rose Mackrell boasts it indirectly in his Memoirs), interpret public opinion, that is, the English humour of it—­the half laugh in their passing and not simulated shudder.

Carinthia had a study of the humours of English character in the person of the wounded man she nursed on little Croridge, imagining it the most unobserved of English homes, and herself as unimportant an object.  Daniel Charner took his wound, as he took his medicine and his posset from her hand, kindly, and seemed to have a charitable understanding of Lord Levellier now that the old nobleman had driven a pellet of lead into him and laid him flat.  It pleased him to assure her that his mates were men of their word, and had promised to pay the old lord with a ‘rouse’ for it, nothing worse.  Her father used to speak of the ’clean hearts of the English’ as to the husbanding of revenge; that is, the ’no spot of bad blood’ to vitiate them.  Captain John Peter seconded all good-humoured fighters ‘for the long account’:  they will surely win; and it was one of his maxims:  ’My foe can spoil my face; he beats me if he spoils my temper.’

Recalling the scene of her bridal day—­the two strong Englishmen at the shake of hands, that had spoiled one another’s faces, she was enlightened with a comprehension of her father’s love for the people; seeing the spiritual of the gross ugly picture, as not every man can do, and but a warrior Joan among women.  Chillon shall teach the Spanish people English heartiness, she thought.  Lord Fleetwood’s remarks on the expedition would have sufficed to stamp it righteous with her; that was her logic of the low valuation of him.  She fancied herself absolutely released at his departure.  Neither her sister Riette nor her friend Owain, administering sentiment and common sense to her by turns, could conceive how the passion for the recovery of her brother’s military name fed the hope that she might aid in it, how the hope fed the passion.  She had besides her hunger to be at the work she could do; her Chillon’s glory for morning sky above it.