last lesson of
the "prodigal son," must not be the first learned by the son of the
gentleman of England--to be fed on the "husks" fit only for the swine.

* * * * *

On my delighted release from this supreme laboratory of statesmen, I
found the state of things considerably altered at Mortimer Castle. I had
left it a stately but rather melancholy-looking household; I found the
mansion glittering in all the novelty of French furniture, gilding, and
_or-molu_--crowded with fashion, and all its menial tribe, from the
groom in the stables to the gentleman's gentleman, who slipped along the
chambers in soft silence, and seemed an embodying of Etiquette, all in
new equipments of all kinds--the avenue trimmed, until it resembled a
theatrical wood; and the grounds, once sober and silent enough for a
Jacques to escape from the sight of human kind, and hold dialogues with
the deer; now levelled, opened, shorn, and shaved, with the precision of
a retired citizen's elysium.

The heads of the family were equally changed; my mother, unhappily, for
the worse. Her fine eyes beamed with joy as she threw herself upon my
neck, and murmured some of those mingled blessings and raptures which
have a language of their own. But when the first flush was past, I
perceived that the cheek was thin, the eye was hollow and heavy, and the
tremulous motion of her slight hand, as it lay in mine, alarmed me; in
all my ignorance of the frailty of the human frame. But the grand change
was in the Earl. My father, whom I had left rather degenerating into the
shape which three courses and a bottle of claret a-day inflict on
country gentlemen "who live at home at ease," was now braced and laced,
costumed in the newest fashion, and overflowing with exuberant
volatility. He breathed of Bond Street. He welcomed me with an ardour
which astonished, more than delighted, me; Talked fragments of French,
congratulated me on my "_air distingue_," advised me to put myself "_en
grande tenue_;" and, after enchanting me in all kinds of strange ways,
concluded by making an attempt to kiss me on both cheeks, like a true
Frenchman. My Eton recollections enabled me to resist the paternal
embrace; until the wonder was simplified, by the discovery that the
family had but just returned from a continental residence of a couple of
years--a matter of which no letter or word had given me the knowledge at
my school. My next discovery was, that an old u