Chelsea, elegant knick-knacks of all kinds. Fashionable
authoresses paid great court to Mr. Mivers; and in the course of his
life as a single man, he had other female adorers besides fashionable
authoresses.

Mr. Mivers had already returned from his early constitutional walk
in the Park, and was now seated by the cylinder _secretaire_ with a
mild-looking man, who was one of the most merciless contributors to "The
Londoner" and no unimportant councillor in the oligarchy of the clique
that went by the name of the "Intellectuals."

"Well," said Mivers, languidly, "I can't even get through the book;
it is as dull as the country in November. But, as you justly say,
the writer is an 'Intellectual,' and a clique would be anything
but intellectual if it did not support its members. Review the book
yourself; mind and make the dulness of it the signal proof of its merit.
Say: 'To the ordinary class of readers this exquisite work may appear
less brilliant than the flippant smartness of'--any other author you
like to name; 'but to the well educated and intelligent every line is
pregnant with,' etc. By the way, when we come by and by to review the
exhibition at Burlington House, there is one painter whom we must try
our best to crush. I have not seen his pictures myself, but he is a new
man; and our friend, who has seen him, is terribly jealous of him, and
says that if the good judges do not put him down at once, the villanous
taste of the public will set him up as a prodigy. A low-lived fellow
too, I hear. There is the name of the man and the subject of the
pictures. See to it when the time comes. Meanwhile, prepare the way for
onslaught on the pictures by occasional sneers at the painter." Here
Mr. Mivers took out of his cylinder a confidential note from the jealous
rival and handed it to his mild-looking _confrere_; then rising, he
said, "I fear we must suspend our business till to-morrow; I expect two
young cousins to breakfast."

As soon as the mild-looking man was gone, Mr. Mivers sauntered to his
drawing-room window, amiably offering a lump of sugar to a canary-bird
sent to him as a present the day before, and who, in the gilded cage
which made part of the present, scanned him suspiciously and refused the
sugar.

Time had remained very gentle in its dealings with Chillingly Mivers.
He scarcely looked a day older than when he was first presented to the
reader on the birth of his kinsman Kenelm. He was reaping the fruit of