n his finger, the
ruffles at his wrist,--all bespoke the gallant who had chatted with
Lord Chesterfield and supped with Mrs. Clive. On a table before him
were placed two or three decanters of wine, the fruits of the season, an
enamelled snuff-box in which was set the portrait of a female (perhaps
the Chloe or Phyllis of his early love-ditties), a lighted taper, a
small china jar containing tobacco, and three or four pipes of homely
clay,--for cherry-sticks and meerschaums were not then in fashion, and
Sir Miles St. John, once a gay and sparkling beau, now a popular country
gentleman, great at county meetings and sheep-shearing festivals, had
taken to smoking, as in harmony with his bucolic transformation. An old
setter lay dozing at his feet; a small spaniel--old, too--was sauntering
lazily in the immediate neighbourhood, looking gravely out for such
stray bits of biscuit as had been thrown forth to provoke him to
exercise, and which hitherto had escaped his attention. Half seated,
half reclined on the balustrade, apart from the baronet, but within
reach of his conversation, lolled a man in the prime of life, with an
air of unmistakable and sovereign elegance and distinction. Mr. Vernon
was a guest from London; and the London man,--the man of clubs and
dinners and routs, of noon loungings through Bond Street, and nights
spent with the Prince of Wales,--seemed stamped not more upon the
careful carelessness of his dress, and upon the worn expression of his
delicate features, than upon the listless ennui, which, characterizing
both his face and attitude, appeared to take pity on himself for having
been entrapped into the country.

Yet we should convey an erroneous impression of Mr. Vernon if we
designed, by the words "listless ennui," to depict the slumberous
insipidity of more modern affectation; it was not the ennui of a man
to whom ennui is habitual, it was rather the indolent prostration that
fills up the intervals of excitement. At that day the word blast was
unknown; men had not enough sentiment for satiety. There was a kind of
Bacchanalian fury in the life led by those leaders of fashion, among
whom Mr. Vernon was not the least distinguished; it was a day of deep
drinking, of high play, of jovial, reckless dissipation, of
strong appetite for fun and riot, of four-in-hand coachmanship, of
prize-fighting, of a strange sort of barbarous manliness that strained
every nerve of the constitution,--a race of life in which t