uch of genius, no more
to do with each other than this book has with the Stock Exchange. Who
would have dreamed of travelling from the Tabard in Southwark to the
last new singer, _via_ Exeter-hall and the lilies of the valley, and
touching en passant on to cardinal virtues and an Irish Viscount? But
see; given only a little impudence, and less logic, and hey presto!
the thing is done; and all that remains to be done is to dilate (as
the Rev. Dionysius O'Blareaway would do at this stage of the process)
upon the moral question which has been so cunningly raised, and to
inquire, firstly,--how the virtues of meekness and humility could be
predicated of Frederick Augustus St. Just, Viscount Scoutbush and
Baron Torytown, in the peerage of Ireland; and secondly,--how those
virtues were called into special action by his questionably wise
attachment to a new actress, to whom he had never spoken a word in his
life.

First, then, "Little Freddy Scoutbush," as his compeers irreverently
termed him, was, by common consent of her Majesty's Guards, a "good
fellow." Whether the St. James' Street definition of that adjective
be the perfect one or not, we will not stay to inquire; but in the
Guards' club-house it meant this: that Scoutbush had not an enemy in
the world, because he deserved none; that he lent, and borrowed not;
gave, and asked not again; envied not; hustled not; slandered not;
never bore malice, never said a cruel word, never played a dirty
trick, would hear a fellow's troubles out to the end, and if he could
not counsel, at least would not laugh at them, and at all times and
in all places lived and let live, and was accordingly a general
favourite. His morality was neither better nor worse than the average
of his companions; but if he was sensual, he was at least not base;
and there were frail women who blessed "little Freddy," and his shy
and secret generosity, from having saved them from the lowest pit.

_Au reste_, he was idle, frivolous, useless; but with these two
palliating facts, that he knew it and regretted it; and that he never
had a chance of being aught else. His father and mother had died when
he was a child. He had been sent to Eton at seven, where he learnt
nothing, and into the Guards at seventeen, where he learnt less than
nothing. His aunt, old Lady Knockdown, who was a kind old Irish woman,
an ex-blue and ex-beauty, now a high Evangelical professor, but as
worldly as her neighbours in practice, had tr