d-natured spectator regards the thronging streets
from a drawing-room window. He could not be called _blase_, but he was
thoroughly _desillusionne_. Once over-romantic, his character now was so
entirely imbued with the neutral tints of life that romance offended his
taste as an obtrusion of violent colour into a sober woof. He was become
a thorough Realist in his code of criticism, and in his worldly mode
of action and thought. But Parson John did not perceive this, for
Welby listened to that gentleman's eulogies on the Ideal school without
troubling himself to contradict them. He had grown too indolent to be
combative in conversation, and only as a critic betrayed such pugnacity
as remained to him by the polished cruelty of sarcasm.

He came off with flying colours through an examination into his Church
orthodoxy instituted by the Parson and Sir Peter. Amid a cloud of
ecclesiastical erudition, his own opinions vanished in those of the
Fathers. In truth, he was a Realist, in religion as in everything else.
He regarded Christianity as a type of existent civilization, which
ought to be reverenced, as one might recognize the other types of that
civilization; such as the liberty of the press, the representative
system, white neckcloths and black coats of an evening, etc. He
belonged, therefore, to what he himself called the school of Eclectical
Christiology; and accommodated the reasonings of Deism to the doctrines
of the Church, if not as a creed, at least as an institution. Finally,
he united all the Chillingly votes in his favour; and when he departed
from the Hall carried off Kenelm for his initiation into the new ideas
that were to govern his generation.

CHAPTER XI.

KENELM remained a year and a half with this distinguished preceptor.
During that time he learned much in book-lore; he saw much, too, of the
eminent men of the day, in literature, the law, and the senate. He saw,
also, a good deal of the fashionable world. Fine ladies, who had been
friends of his mother in her youth, took him up, counselled and petted
him,--one in especial, the Marchioness of Glenalvon, to whom he was
endeared by grateful association, for her youngest son had been a
fellow-pupil of Kenelm at Merton School, and Kenelm had saved his life
from drowning. The poor boy died of consumption later, and her grief for
his loss made her affection for Kenelm yet more tender. Lady Glenalvon
was one of the queens of the London world. Though in the