alling and heavy.

It is not a question of marriage on three hundred a year without
prospects, but a marriage on five or six hundred a year with good
expectations. In the Inns of Court there are, at the present time,
scores of clever, industrious fine-hearted gentlemen who have sure
incomes of three or four hundred pounds per annum. In Tyburnia and
Kensington there is an equal number of young gentlewomen with incomes
varying between L150 and L300 a year. These men and women see each other
at balls and dinners, in the parks and at theatres; the ladies would not
dislike to be wives, the men are longing to be husbands. But that
hideous tyrant, social opinion, bids them avoid marriage.

In Lord Eldon's time the case was otherwise. Society saw nothing
singular or reprehensible in his conduct when he brought Bessie to live
in the little house in Cursitor Street. No one sneered at the young
law-student, whose home was a little den in a dingy thoroughfare. At a
later date, the rising junior, whose wife lived over his business
chambers in Carey Street, was the object of no unkind criticism because
his domestic arrangements were inexpensive, and almost frugal. Had his
success been tardy instead of quick and decisive, and had circumstances
compelled him to live under the shadow of Lincoln's Inn wall for thirty
years on a narrow income, he would not on that account have suffered
from a single disparaging criticism. Amongst his neighbors in adjacent
streets, and within the boundaries of his Inn, he would have found
society for himself and wife, and playmates for his children. Good
fortune coming in full strong flood, he was not compelled to greatly
change his plan of existence. Even in those days, when costly
ostentation characterized aristocratic society--he was permitted to live
modestly--and lay the foundation of that great property which he
transmitted to his ennobled descendants.

When satire has done its worst with the miserly propensities of the
great lawyer and his wife, their long familiar intercourse exhibits a
wealth of fine human affection and genuine poetry which sarcasm cannot
touch. Often as he had occasion to regret Lady Eldon's peculiarities--the
stinginess which made her grudge the money paid for a fish or a basket of
fruit; the nervous repugnance to society, which greatly diminished his
popularity; and the taste for solitude and silence which marked her
painfully towards the close of her life--the Chancellor nev