authors! This was the
beau-ideal of Algernon Sidney's Aristocratic Republic, of the Helvetian
vision of what ought to be the dispensation of public distinctions;
yet was it, after all, a desirable aristocracy? Did society gain; did
literature lose? Was the priesthood of Genius made more sacred and more
pure by these worldly decorations and hollow titles; or was aristocracy
itself thus rendered a more disinterested, a more powerful, or a more
sagacious element in the administration of law, or the elevation of
opinion? These questions, not lightly to be answered, could not fail to
arouse the speculation and curiosity of a man who had been familiar with
the closet and the forum; and in proportion as he found his interest
excited in these problems to be solved by a foreign nation, did the
thoughtful Englishman feel the old instinct--which binds the citizen
to the fatherland--begin to stir once more earnestly and vividly within
him.

"You, yourself individually, are passing like us," said De Montaigne one
day to Maltravers, "through a state of transition. You have forever left
the Ideal, and you are carrying your cargo of experience over to the
Practical. When you reach that haven, you will have completed the
development of your forces."

"You mistake me,--I am but a spectator."

"Yes; but you desire to go behind the scenes; and he who once grows
familiar with the green-room, longs to be an actor."

With Madame de Ventadour and the De Montaignes Maltravers passed the
chief part of his time. They knew how to appreciate his nobler and
to love his gentler attributes and qualities; they united in a warm
interest for his future fate; they combated his Philosophy of Inaction;
and they felt that it was because he was not happy that he was not wise.
Experience was to him what ignorance had been to Alice. His faculties
were chilled and dormant. As affection to those who are unskilled in all
things, so is affection to those who despair of all things. The mind of
Maltravers was a world without a sun!

CHAPTER III.

COELEBS, quid agam?*--HORACE.

* "What shall I do, a bachelor?"

IN a room at Fenton's Hotel sat Lord Vargrave and Caroline Lady
Doltimore,--two months after the marriage of the latter.

"Doltimore has positively fixed, then, to go abroad on your return from
Cornwall?"

"Positively,--to Paris. You can join us at Christmas, I trust?"

"I have no doubt of it; and before then I hope that I shall have
arra