him that unmeaning veil to imbecility which
Rochefoucauld has so happily called "the mystery of the body." The
variety and depth of his learning fully sustained the respect which his
demeanour insensibly created. To say nothing of his lore in the dead
tongues, he possessed a knowledge of the principal European languages
besides his own, namely, English, Italian, German, and Spanish, not less
accurate and little less fluent than that of a native; and he had not
only gained the key to these various coffers of intellectual wealth, but
he had also possessed himself of their treasures. He had been
educated at St. Omer: and, young as he was, he had already acquired no
inconsiderable reputation among his brethren of that illustrious and
celebrated Order of Jesus which has produced some of the worst and some
of the best men that the Christian world has ever known,--which has, in
its successful zeal for knowledge, and the circulation of mental light,
bequeathed a vast debt of gratitude to posterity; but which, unhappily
encouraging certain scholastic doctrines, that by a mind at once subtle
and vicious can be easily perverted into the sanction of the most
dangerous and systematized immorality, has already drawn upon its
professors an almost universal odium.

So highly established was the good name of Montreuil that when, three
years prior to the time of which I now speak, he had been elected to the
office he held in our family, it was scarcely deemed a less fortunate
occurrence for us to gain so learned and so pious a preceptor, than it
was for him to acquire a situation of such trust and confidence in the
household of a Marshal of France and the especial favourite of Louis
XIV.

It was pleasant enough to mark the gradual ascendency he gained over my
uncle; and the timorous dislike which the good knight entertained for
him, yet struggled to conceal. Perhaps that was the only time in his
life in which Sir William Devereux was a hypocrite.

Enough of the priest at present; I return to his charge. To school we
went: our parting with our uncle was quite pathetic; mine in especial.
"Hark ye, Sir Count," whispered he (I bore my father's title), "hark
ye, don't mind what the old priest tells you; your real man of wit never
wants the musty lessons of schools in order to make a figure in the
world. Don't cramp your genius, my boy; read over my play, and honest
George Etherege's 'Man of Mode;' they'll keep your spirits alive, after
do