published under the pseudonym of Diaper Sandoe, were
so pure and bloodless in their love passages, and at the same time so
biting in their moral tone, that his reputation was great among the
virtuous, who form the larger portion of the English book-buying public.
Election-seasons called him to ballad-poetry on behalf of the Tory
party. Dialer possessed undoubted fluency, but did tittle, though Sir
Austin was ever expecting much of him.

A languishing, inexperienced woman, whose husband in mental and in moral
stature is more than the ordinary height above her, and who, now that
her first romantic admiration of his lofty bearing has worn off, and her
fretful little refinements of taste and sentiment are not instinctively
responded to, is thrown into no wholesome household collision with a
fluent man, fluent in prose and rhyme. Lady Feverel, when she first
entered on her duties at Raynham, was jealous of her husband's friend.
By degrees she tolerated him. In time he touched his guitar in her
chamber, and they played Rizzio and Mary together.

"For I am not the first who found
The name of Mary fatal!"

says a subsequent sentimental alliterative love-poem of Diaper's.

Such was the outline of the story. But the baronet could fill it up. He
had opened his soul to these two. He had been noble Love to the one, and
to the other perfect Friendship. He had bid them be brother and sister
whom he loved, and live a Golden Age with him at Raynham. In fact, he
had been prodigal of the excellences of his nature, which it is not good
to be, and, like Timon, he became bankrupt, and fell upon bitterness.

The faithless lady was of no particular family; an orphan daughter of an
admiral who educated her on his half-pay, and her conduct struck but at
the man whose name she bore.

After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship, Sir Austin was
left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love upon save
a little baby boy in a cradle. He forgave the man: he put him aside as
poor for his wrath. The woman he could not forgive; she had sinned every
way. Simple ingratitude to a benefactor was a pardonable transgression,
for he was not one to recount and crush the culprit under the heap of
his good deeds. But her he had raised to be his equal, and he judged her
as his equal. She had blackened the world's fair aspect for him.

In the presence of that world, so different to him now, he preserved
his wonted deme