had left, over which all the glory and royalty of England at one time or another had rolled.  Under these majestic oaks and cedars Cromwell and Ireton had stood while the beaten Royalists lashed their horses on to Brentford.  Nor did I forget that the renowned Addison had lived here after his unhappy marriage with Lady Warwick, and had often ridden hence to Button’s Coffee House in town, where my grandfather had had his dinner with Dean Swift.

We sat gazing at the building, which was bathed in the early sun, at the deer and sheep grazing in the park, at the changing colours of the young leaves as the breeze swayed them.  The market wagons had almost ceased now, and there was little to break the stillness.

“You love the place?” I said.

He started, as though I had awakened him out of a sleep.  And he was no longer the Fox of the clubs, the cynical, the reckless.  He was no longer the best-dressed man in St. James’s Street, or the aggressive youngster of St. Stephen’s.

“Love it!” he cried.  “Ay, Richard, and few guess how well.  You will not laugh when I tell you that my happiest days have been passed here, when I was but a chit, in the long room where Addison used to walk up and down composing his Spectators:  or trotting after my father through these woods and gardens.  A kinder parent does not breathe than he.  Well I remember how he tossed me in his arms under that tree when I had thrashed another lad for speaking ill of him.  He called me his knight.  In all my life he has never broken faith with me.  When they were blasting down a wall where those palings now stand, he promised me I should see it done, and had it rebuilt and blown down again because I had missed the sight.  All he ever exacted of me was that I should treat him as an elder brother.  He had his own notion of the world I was going into, and prepared me accordingly.  He took me from Eton to Spa, where I learned gaming instead of Greek, and gave me so much a night to risk at play.”

I looked at him in astonishment.  To say that I thought these relations strange would have been a waste of words.

“To be sure,” Charles continued, “I was bound to learn, and could acquire no younger.”  He flicked the glossy red backs of his horses with his whip.  “You are thinking it an extraordinary education, I know,” he added rather sadly.  “I hav a-told you this—­God knows why!  Yes, because I like you damnably, and you would have heard worse elsewhere, both of him and of me.  I fear you have listened to the world’s opinion of Lord Holland.”

Indeed, I had heard a deal of that nobleman’s peculations of the public funds.  But in this he was no worse than the bulk of his colleagues.  His desertion of William Pitt I found hard to forgive.