pistical
friend, Lord Feltre, with him, of course, after Jesuit arts had allured
him to that place of torrents and lightnings and canticles and demon
echoes, all as though expressly contrived for the horrifying of sinners
into penitence and confession and the monkish cowl up to life's end, not
to speak of the abjuration of worldly possessions and donation of them
into the keeping of the shaven brothers; when either they would have
settled a band of them here in our very midst, or they would have
impoverished--is not too strong a word--the country by taking the money's
worth of the mines, estates, mansions, freehold streets and squares of
our metropolis out of it without scruple; rejoicing so to bleed the
Protestant faith. Underrate it now--then it was a truly justifiable
anxiety: insomuch that you heard people of station, eminent titled
persons, asking, like the commonest low Radicals, whether it was prudent
legislation to permit of the inheritance of such vast wealth by a young
man, little more than a boy, and noted for freaks. And some declared it
could not be allowed for foreign monks to have a claim to inherit English
property. There was a general consent, that if the Earl of Fleetwood went
to the extreme of making over his property to those monks, he should be
pronounced insane and incapable. Ultimately the world was a little
pacified by hearing that a portion of it was entailed, Esslemont and the
Welsh mines.

So it might be; but what if he had no child! The marriage amazing
everybody scarcely promised fruit, it was thought. Countess Livia, much
besought for her opinion, scouted the possibility. And Carinthia Jane was
proclaimed by John Rose Mackrell (to his dying day the poor gentleman
tried vainly to get the second syllable of his name accentuated) a young
woman who would outlive twice over the husband she had. He said of his
name, it was destined to pass him down a dead fish in the nose of
posterity, and would affect his best jokes; which something has done, or
the present generation has lost the sense of genuine humour.

Thanks to him, the talk of the Whitechapel Countess again sprang up,
merrily as ever; and after her having become, as he said, 'a desiccated
celebrity,' she outdid cabinet ministers and naughty wives for a living
morsel in the world's mouth. She was denounced by the patriotic party as
the cause of the earl's dalliance with Rome.

The earl, you are to know, was then coasting along the Mediter