, and not on your own knowledge.
The acquaintance of years would have left you equally dark as to his
vices or his virtues. He varied often, yet in each variation he was
equally undiscoverable. Was he performing a series of parts, or was it
the ordinary changes of a man's true temperament that you beheld in him?
Commonly smooth, quiet, attentive, flattering in social intercourse,
he was known in the senate and courts of law for a cold asperity, and a
caustic venom,--scarcely rivalled even in those arenas of contention.
It seemed as if the bitterer feelings he checked in private life,
he delighted to indulge in public. Yet even there he gave not way to
momentary petulance or gushing passion; all seemed with him systematic
sarcasm or habitual sternness. He outraged no form of ceremonial or of
society. He stung, without appearing conscious of the sting; and his
antagonist writhed not more beneath the torture of his satire than the
crushing contempt of his self-command. Cool, ready, armed and defended
on all points, sound in knowledge, unfailing in observation, equally
consummate in sophistry when needed by himself, and instantaneous
in detecting sophistry in another; scorning no art, however painful;
begrudging no labour, however weighty; minute in detail, yet not the
less comprehending the whole subject in a grasp,--such was the legal and
public character William Brandon had established, and such was the fame
he joined to the unsullied purity of his moral reputation. But to his
friends he seemed only the agreeable, clever, lively, and, if we may
use the phrase innocently, the worldly man,--never affecting a superior
sanctity, or an over-anxiety to forms, except upon great occasions; and
rendering his austerity of manners the more admired, because he made it
seem so unaccompanied by hypocrisy.

"Well," said Brandon, as he sat after dinner alone with his relations,
and had seen the eyes of his brother close in diurnal slumber, "tell
me, Miss Lucy, what you think of Lord Mauleverer; do you find him
agreeable?"

"Very; too much so, indeed!"

"Too much so! That is an uncommon fault, Lucy, unless you mean to
insinuate that you find him too agreeable for your peace of mind."

"Oh, no! there is little fear of that. All that I meant to express was
that he seems to make it the sole business of his life to be agreeable,
and that one imagines he had gained that end by the loss of certain
qualities which one would have liked bette