ating fables touching persons of
whom he thought lightly, and that being done he was devoid of malice,
unless by chance his feelings or his interests were so aggrieved that his
original haphazard impulse was bent to embrace new circumstances and be
the parent of a line of successive impulses, in the main resembling an
extremely far-sighted plot, whereat he gazed back with fondness, all the
while protesting sincerely his perfect innocence of anything of the kind.
Circumstances will often interwind with the moods of simply irritated
men. In the present instance he could just perceive what might
immediately come of his reading out of this atrocious epistle wherein
Nevil Beauchamp was displayed the dangling puppet of a mountebank
wire-pulley, infidel, agitator, leveller, and scoundrel. Cognizant of Mr.
Romfrey's overtures to Colonel Halkett, he traced them to that scheming
woman in the house at Steynham, and he was of opinion that it was a
friendly and good thing to do to let the old colonel and Cissy Halkett
know Mr. Nevil through a bit of his correspondence. This, then, was a
matter of business and duty that furnished an excuse for his going out of
his, way to call at Mount Laurels on the old familiar footing, so as not
to alarm the heiress.

A warrior accustomed to wear the burnished breastplates between London
and Windsor has, we know, more need to withstand than to discharge the
shafts of amorous passion; he is indeed, as an object of beauty,
notoriously compelled to be of the fair sex in his tactics, and must
practise the arts and whims of nymphs to preserve himself: and no doubt
it was the case with the famous Captain Baskelett, in whose mind sweet
ladies held the place that the pensive politician gives to the masses,
dreadful in their hatred, almost as dreadful in their affection. But an
heiress is a distinct species among women; he hungered for the heiress;
his elevation to Parliament made him regard her as both the ornament and
the prop of his position; and it should be added that his pride, all the
habits of thought of a conqueror of women, had been shocked by that
stupefying rejection of him, which Cecilia had intimated to her father
with the mere lowering of her eyelids. Conceive the highest bidder at an
auction hearing the article announce that it will not have him! Captain
Baskelett talked of it everywhere for a month or so:--the girl could not
know her own mind, for she suited him exactly! and he requested th