ied to make him a good
boy in old times: but she had given him up, long before he left Eton,
as a "vessel of wrath" (which he certainly was, with his hot Irish
temper); and since then she had only spoken of him with moans, and to
him just as if he and she had made a compact to be as worldly as they
could, and as if the fact that he was going, as she used to tell
her private friends, straight to the wrong place, was to be utterly
ignored before the pressing reality of getting him and his sisters
well married. And so it befell, that Lady Knockdown, like many more,
having begun with too high (or at least precise) a spiritual standard,
was forced to end practically in having no standard at all; and that
for ten years of Scoutbush's life, neither she nor any other human
being had spoken to him as if he had a soul to be saved, or any duty
on earth save to eat, drink, and be merry.

And all the while there was a quaint and pathetic consciousness in the
little man's heart that he was meant for something better; that he was
no fool, and was not intended to be one. He would thrust his head into
lectures at the Polytechnic and the British Institution, with a dim
endeavour to guess what they were all about, and a good-natured envy
of the clever fellows who knew about "science, and all that." He would
sit and listen, puzzled and admiring, to the talk of statesmen, and
confide his woe afterwards to some chum.--"Ah, if I had had the chance
now that my cousin Chalkclere has! If I had had two or three tutors,
and a good mother, too, keeping me in a coop, and cramming me with
learning, as they cram chickens for the market, I fancy I could have
shown my comb and hackles in the House as well as some of them. I
fancy I could make a speech in parliament now, with the help of a
little Irish impudence, if I only knew anything to speak about."

So Scoutbush clung, in a childish way, to any superior man who would
take notice of him, and not treat him as the fribble which he seemed.
He had taken to that well-known artist, Claude Mellot, of late, simply
from admiration of his brilliant talk about art and poetry; and boldly
confessed that he preferred one of Mellot's orations on the sublime
and beautiful, though he didn't understand a word of them, to the
songs and jokes (very excellent ones in their way) of Mr. Hector
Harkaway, the distinguished Irish novelist, and boon companion of her
Majesty's Life Guards Green. His special intimate and Mentor