to the glory of the house was a great distinction of
which a rich peer, with six seats in the House of Commons, could not
ultimately despair. Lord Fitz-Warene aspired to rank among the earls
of England. But the successors of Mr Pitt were strong; they thought the
Fitz-Warenes had already been too rapidly advanced; it was whispered
that the king did not like the new man; that his majesty thought him
pompous, full of pretence, in short, a fool. But though the successors
of Mr Pitt managed to govern the country for twenty years and were
generally very strong, in such an interval of time however good their
management or great their luck, there were inevitably occasions
when they found themselves in difficulties, when it was necessary to
conciliate the lukewarm or to reward the devoted. Lord Fitz-Warene well
understood how to avail himself of these occasions; it was astonishing
how conscientious and scrupulous he became during Walcheren expeditions,
Manchester massacres, Queen's trials. Every scrape of the government was
a step in the ladder to the great borough-monger. The old king too had
disappeared from the stage; and the tawdry grandeur of the great Norman
peer rather suited George the Fourth. He was rather a favourite at the
Cottage; they wanted his six votes for Canning; he made his terms; and
one of the means by which we got a man of genius for a minister, was
elevating Lord Fitz-Warene in the peerage, by the style and title of
Earl de Mowbray of Mowbray Castle.

Book 2 Chapter 8

We must now for a while return to the strangers of the Abbey ruins. When
the two men had joined the beautiful Religious, whose apparition had so
startled Egremont, they all three quitted the Abbey by a way which led
them by the back of the cloister garden, and so on by the bank of the
river for about a hundred yards, when they turned up the winding glen of
a dried-up tributary stream. At the head of the glen, at which they soon
arrived, was a beer-shop, screened by some huge elms from the winds that
blew over the vast moor, which, except in the direction of Mardale, now
extended as far as the eye could reach. Here the companions stopped, the
beautiful Religious seated herself on a stone bench beneath the trees,
while the elder stranger calling out to the inmate of the house to
apprise him of his return, himself proceeded to a neighbouring shed,
whence he brought forth a very small rough pony with a rude saddle, but
one evidently i