a
public man of high rank and reputation, and even more than one Prime
Minister, had contributed in their time to its famous pages, but never
without being paid. It was the organic law of this publication, that
gratuitous contributions should never be admitted. And in this principle
there was as much wisdom as pride. Celebrated statesmen would point with
complacency to the snuff-box or the picture which had been purchased by
their literary labour, and there was more than one bracelet on the arm
of Mrs. Ferrars, and more than one genet in her stable, which had been
the reward of a profound or a slashing article by William.

What had been the occasional diversion of political life was now to
be the source of regular income. Though living in profound solitude,
Ferrars had a vast sum of political experience to draw upon, and though
his training and general intelligence were in reality too exclusive and
academical for the stirring age which had now opened, and on which he
had unhappily fallen, they nevertheless suited the audience to which
they were particularly addressed. His Corinthian style, in which the
Maenad of Mr. Burke was habited in the last mode of Almack's, his
sarcasms against the illiterate and his invectives against the low, his
descriptions of the country life of the aristocracy contrasted with
the horrors of the guillotine, his Horatian allusions and his Virgilian
passages, combined to produce a whole which equally fascinated and
alarmed his readers.

These contributions occasioned some communications with the editor or
publisher of the Review, which were not without interest. Parcels came
down by the coach, enclosing not merely proof sheets, but frequently new
books--the pamphlet of the hour before it was published, or a volume
of discoveries in unknown lands. It was a link to the world they had
quitted without any painful associations. Otherwise their communications
with the outside world were slight and rare. It is difficult for us,
who live in an age of railroads, telegraphs, penny posts and penny
newspapers, to realise how uneventful, how limited in thought and
feeling, as well as in incident, was the life of an English family of
retired habits and limited means, only forty years ago. The whole world
seemed to be morally, as well as materially, "adscripti glebae."

Mr. and Mrs. Ferrars did not wish to move, but had they so wished, it
would have been under any circumstances for them a laborious and cost