R XXI.

The conversation of two men bred at the same school or college, when
they happen to meet afterward, is commonly uninteresting, not to say
tiresome, to a third person, as involving local circumstances in which
he has no concern. But this was not always the case since the meeting of
my two friends. Something was generally to be gained by their
communications even on these unpromising topics.

At breakfast Mr. Stanley said, "Sir John, you will see here at dinner
to-morrow our old college acquaintance, Ned Tyrrel. Though he does not
commonly live at the family house in this neighborhood, but at a little
place he has in Buckinghamshire, he comes among us periodically to
receive his rents. He always invites himself, for his society is not the
most engaging."

"I heard," replied Sir John, "that he became a notorious profligate
after he left Cambridge, though I have lost sight of him ever since we
parted there. But I was glad to learn lately that he is become quite a
reformed man."

"He is so far reformed," replied Mr. Stanley, "that he is no longer
grossly licentious. But in laying down the vices of youth, he has taken
up successively those which he thought better suited to the successive
stages of his progress. As he withdrew himself from his loose habits and
connections, ambition became his governing passion; he courted public
favor, thirsted for place and distinction, and labored by certain
obliquities, and some little sacrifices of principle, to obtain
promotion. Finding it did not answer, and all his hopes failing, he now
rails at ambition, wonders men will wound their consciences and renounce
their peace for vain applause and 'the bubble reputation.' His sole
delight at present, I hear, is in amassing money and reading
controversial divinity. Avarice has supplanted ambition, just as
ambition expelled profligacy.

"In the interval in which he was passing from one of these stages to the
other, in a very uneasy state of mind he dropped in by accident where a
famous irregular preacher was disseminating his Antinomian doctrines.
Caught by his vehement but coarse eloquence, and captivated by an
alluring doctrine which promised much while it required little, he
adopted the soothing but fallacious tenet. It is true, I hear he is
become a more respectable man in his conduct, but I doubt, though I have
not lately seen him, if his present state may not be rather worse than
his former ones.

"In the two previous st