tary. A note, by no means too gentle in its tone, was
instantly despatched to my noble brother, enquiring why he did not
contrive to keep the minor branches of his family in better order, and
threatening him with the withdrawal of the county patronage. My demand
of a commission in the Guards was no longer answered by the head of our
house with astonishment at the loftiness of my expectations, and
statements of the utter emptiness of the family exchequer. The result of
his brief correspondence with Downing Street was a letter, notifying
that his majesty was pleased to accept my services in the Coldstream.

I was enraptured, and my brother was enraptured, for we had both gained
our objects. I had got rid of him and ennui. He had got rid of me, and
the displeasure of the grand dispensers of place and pension. No time
was lost in forwarding me to make my bow at the Horse Guards; and my
noble brother lost as little time in making me put my hand to a paper,
in which, for prompt payment, I relinquished one half of my legacy. But
what cared I for money? I had obtained a profession in which money was
contemptible, the only purse the military chest, and the only prize,
like Nelson's, a peerage or Westminster Abbey. The ferment did not cool
within the week, and within that period I had taken leave of half the
county, been wished laurels and aiguillettes by a hundred or a thousand
of the fairest of our country belles; and been wished a thousand miles
off by the wise matrons, to whom the sight of a "younger son without
house or land" is a nuisance, a kite among their family pigeons.

At that moment, however, all their dovecots were secure. I should not
have spent a sigh on the Venus de Medicis had she sprung from her
pedestal to enchant me. The world was open before me; and trite and
trifling objects were no more to occupy my time. I felt like one who,
after wandering all day through the depths of an American forest,
suddenly reaches its border, and sees before him the boundless prairie,
with its boundlessness still more striking, from the absence of any
distinct object on which the eye could rest. What were horses, dogs, and
country dinners, to the world of London and of life which now came in
full, and, I will own it, extravagant vision before me? The ideas which
I conceived of men and things, of my own fortunes, and the fortunate
exercise of my own powers, were of an order which, in my calmer days,
have often made me smile; yet w