aid the great proprietor,
almost piteously.

"Rather what could I do without parliament? Public life is the only
existence I own. Parliament is all in all to me. But we may cross now."

Harley's eye glittered cold as it followed the tall form of the
statesman, towering high above all other passers-by. "Ay," he muttered,
"ay, rest as sure of my friendship as I was of thine! And be Lansmere
our field of Philippi! There where thy first step was made in the only
life that thou own'st as existence, shall the ladder itself rot from
under thy footing. There, where thy softer victim slunk to death from
the deceit of thy love, shall deceit like thine own dig a grave for thy
frigid ambition. I borrow thy quiver of fraud; its still arrows shall
strike thee; and thou too shalt say, when the barb pierces home, 'This
comes from the hand of a friend.' Ay, at Lansmere, at Lansmere, shall
the end crown the whole! Go, and dot on the canvas the lines for a
lengthened perspective, where my eyes note already the vanishing point
of the picture."

Then through the dull fog and under the pale gas-lights Harley
L'Estrange pursued his noiseless way, soon distinguished no more amongst
the various, motley, quick-succeeding groups, with their infinite
sub-divisions of thought, care, and passion; while, loud over all their
low murmurs, or silent hearts, were heard the tramp of horses and din of
wheels, and the vociferous discordant cry that had ceased to attract and
interest in the ears it vexed, "Great News, Great News--Dissolution of
Parliament--Great News!"

CHAPTER XIX.

The scene is at Lansmere Park,--a spacious pile, commenced in the reign
of Charles II.; enlarged and altered in the reign of Anne. Brilliant
interval in the History of our National Manners, when even the courtier
dreaded to be dull, and Sir Fopling raised himself on tiptoe to catch
the ear of a wit; when the names of Devonshire and Dorset, Halifax and
Carteret, Oxford and Bolingbroke, unite themselves, brotherlike, with
those of Hobbes and of Dryden, of Prior and Bentley, of Arbuthnot, Gay,
Pope, and Swift; and still, wherever we turn, to recognize some ideal of
great Lord or fine Gentleman, the Immortals of Literature stand by his
side.

The walls of the rooms at Lansmere were covered with the portraits of
those who illustrate that time which Europe calls the Age of Louis XIV.
A L'Estrange, who had lived through the reigns of four English princes
(and with no mean