rhaps,
the reason why he was so much thought of. He had been by far the
most brilliant boy of his time at Eton,--not only the boast of the
cricket-ground, but the marvel of the schoolroom; yet so full of whims
and oddities, and seeming to achieve his triumphs with so little aid
from steadfast application, that he had not left behind him the same
expectations of solid eminence which his friend and senior, Audley
Egerton, had excited. His eccentricities, his quaint sayings, and
out-of-the-way actions, became as notable in the great world as they had
been in the small one of a public school. That he was very clever there
was no doubt, and that the cleverness was of a high order might be
surmised, not only from the originality but the independence of his
character. He dazzled the world, without seeming to care for its praise
or its censure,--dazzled it, as it were, because he could not help
shining. He had some strange notions, whether political or social, which
rather frightened his father. According to Southey, "A man should be
no more ashamed of having been a republican than of having been young."
Youth and extravagant opinions naturally go together. I don't know
whether Harley L'Estrange was a republican at the age of eighteen; but
there was no young man in London who seemed to care less for being heir
to an illustrious name and some forty or fifty thousand pounds a year.
It was a vulgar fashion in that day to play the exclusive, and cut
persons who wore bad neckcloths, and called themselves Smith or Johnson.
Lord L'Estrange never cut any one, and it was quite enough to slight
some worthy man because of his neckcloth or his birth to insure to
the offender the pointed civilities of this eccentric successor to the
Belforts and the Wildairs.

It was the wish of his father that Harley, as soon as he came of age,
should represent the borough of Lansmere (which said borough was the
single plague of the earl's life). But this wish was never realized.
Suddenly, when the young idol of London still wanted some two or three
years of his majority, a new whim appeared to seize him. He
withdrew entirely from society; he left unanswered the most pressing
three-cornered notes of inquiry and invitation that ever strewed the
table of a young Guardsman; he was rarely seen anywhere in his former
haunts,--when seen, was either alone or with Egerton; and his gay
spirits seemed wholly to have left him. A profound melancholy was
written in hi