that the elements of human nature could have furnished forth a
more amiable character than Sir William Devereux presiding at Christmas
over the merriment of his great hall.

Good old man! his very defects were what we loved best in him: vanity
was so mingled with good-nature, that it became graceful, and we
reverenced one the most, while we most smiled at the other.

One peculiarity had he which the age he had lived in and his domestic
history rendered natural enough; namely, an exceeding distaste to the
matrimonial state: early marriages were misery, imprudent marriages
idiotism, and marriage, at the best, he was wont to say, with a kindling
eye and a heightened colour, marriage at the best was the devil! Yet it
must not be supposed that Sir William Devereux was an ungallant man. On
the contrary, never did the _beau sexe_ have a humbler or more devoted
servant. As nothing in his estimation was less becoming to a wise man
than matrimony, so nothing was more ornamental than flirtation.

He had the old man's weakness, garrulity; and he told the wittiest
stories in the world, without omitting anything in them but the point.
This omission did not arise from the want either of memory or of humour;
but solely from a deficiency in the malice natural to all jesters. He
could not persuade his lips to repeat a sarcasm hurting even the dead or
the ungrateful; and when he came to the drop of gall which should have
given zest to the story, the milk of human kindness broke its barrier,
despite of himself,--and washed it away. He was a fine wreck, a little
prematurely broken by dissipation, but not perhaps the less interesting
on that account; tall, and somewhat of the jovial old English girth,
with a face where good-nature and good living mingled their smiles
and glow. He wore the garb of twenty years back, and was curiously
particular in the choice of his silk stockings. Between you and me, he
was not a little vain of his leg, and a compliment on that score was
always sure of a gracious reception.

The solitude of my uncle's household was broken by an invasion of three
boys,--none of the quietest,--and their mother, who, the gentlest and
saddest of womankind, seemed to follow them, the emblem of that primeval
silence from which all noise was born. These three boys were my two
brothers and myself. My father, who had conceived a strong personal
attachment for Louis XIV., never quitted his service, and the great
King repaid him by o