rn to Riversley, missing the night of the grand ball
with no profound regret, except for my father's sake. He wrote soon
after one of his characteristic letters, to tell me that the ball
had, been a success. Immediately upon this announcement, he indulged
luxurious reflections, as his manner was:

'To have stirred up the old place and given it something to dream of for
the next half century, is a satisfaction, Richie. I have a kindness for
Bath. I leave it with its factions reconciled, its tea-tables furnished
with inexhaustible supplies of the chief thing necessary, and the
persuasion firmly established in my own bosom that it is impossible to
revive the past, so we must march with the age. And let me add, all but
every one of the bills happily discharged, to please you. Pray, fag at
your German. If (as I myself confess to) you have enjoyment of old
ways, habits, customs, and ceremonies, look to Court life. It is only
in Courts that a man may now air a leg; and there the women are works
of Art. If you are deficient in calves (which my boy, thank heaven!
will never be charged with) you are there found out, and in fact every
deficiency, every qualification, is at once in patent exhibition at a
Court. I fancy Parliament for you still, and that is no impediment as a
step. Jorian would have you sit and wallow in ease, and buy (by the way,
we might think of it) a famous Burgundy vineyard (for an investment),
devote the prime of your life to the discovery of a cook, your manhood
to perfect the creature's education--so forth; I imagine you are to get
five years of ample gratification (a promise hardly to be relied on) in
the sere leaf, and so perish. Take poor Jorian for an example of what
the absence of ambition brings men to. I treasure Jorian, I hoard the
poor fellow, to have him for a lesson to my boy. Witty and shrewd, and a
masterly tactician (I wager he would have won his spurs on the field
of battle), you see him now living for one hour of the day--absolutely
twenty-three hours of the man's life are chained slaves, beasts of
burden, to the four-and-twentieth! So, I repeat, fag at your German.

'Miss Penrhys retires to her native Wales; Jorian and I on to London, to
the Continent. Plinlimmon guard us all! I send you our local newspapers.
That I cut entrechats is false. It happens to be a thing I could do, and
not an Englishman in England except myself; only I did not do it. I
did appear in what I was educated to believe