late had passed, and become a better man. Before his mental vision the home of his infancy and all its endearing associations appeared-that home of his fathers, with all its res angusta domi, but never of dishonesty or dishonour-yes! and picturing fancy resummoned to his sight the death-bed scene of her who gave him birth, and again the ear heard her exclaim" O'Connor, my child, regard your honour more than life, and remember these words when your mother is dust!" As if involuntarily he repeated them-startled at their sound! How altered since then-it was Jacob's voice, but the hands were the hands of Esau! At this moment his traducers arrived.

Lord Squanderfield's history is soon told. The founder of his noble house had, by finesse, a disregard for all tight-laced trammels, and by lax, accommodating principles, raised himself from obscurity; and by pandering to the bad passions, and lending himself as the supple tool of the bluff Harry, he had gained monarchical favour and ensured

his fortune. His royal master, in the full appreciation of a servile obedience, and in the recognition of an ever willing coadjutant to deeds of whatever complexion, not only granted to him, and his heirs male for ever, absolutely, a goodly extent of fair lands, once wrung by priestly artifice at the dying confessional from shriven sinners; but he also exalted the recipient of these bounties, by entitling him to sit on the crimson benches in senatorial council, with the descendants of Aubrey de Vere and Peter de Ros. When Henry despised the Pope's nuncios and laughed at excommunication, this favourite courtier used every argument to make the monarch carry out his schemes of reformation. He reminded him of the tyranny of Hildebrand, the shameful treatment, and abject vassalage of Henry IV. of Germany, and instanced the arbitrary negociations proffered by the intermeddling conclave of cardinals, with every crown in Europe.

When monastic supremacy was doomed to fall, and cloister iniquities were to be exposed, this vindictive and unscrupulous

servant of the king was eager to institute the requisite inquiries. At the nod of his sovereign he formed one of a commission to seize upon monastic domains, to carry off abbatial revenues, to burn non-comformists, and also, if required, he was not unwilling to lend his hand to Cranmer in dwarfing down the ceremonials, and conveniently modifying the service of the Church. When Anne Boleyn was doomed to be sacrificed, in order to give place to another victim of unholy lust, Henry beheld, in this sycophant, a subservient creature, and one who scrupled not to raise his voice in the unjust condemnation of virtue and innocence. The coronet and the ermine, as a price, had been paid, and the purchaser of perjury and crime demanded his quid pro quo. In a succeeding age, the inheritor of confiscated glebes, and scandalously granted titles, if he had not the founder's vices, there could, in his moral constitution, be detected the transmitted traces of cunning and avarice. When James II., in a spirit of perverse stupidity, made an effort to restore Papacy, it became policy

on the part of those now owning ecclesiastical territories to cry for William of Orange, rather than support the Stuarts, whose Protestant sincerity was ever doubted, and who were always, more or less, under the influence of the Vatican.

When the resolutions of the Hague were carried into effect, and the acknowledged champion of Protestantism debarked his forces at Torbay, the noble now spoken of at once joined the invader's standard, and, after the king had established his throne, this allegiance was rewarded by raising the barony to an earldom. The successor of the earl, by an influential matrimonial alliance, and by going over to the ranks of the ministerialists at a critical juncture, was raised to a marquisate; nor did his aspirations end here, as the strawberry-leaf was, to his dying-day, the goal of his ambition.

The third Marquis of Monkford (Squanderfield's father) had, in his young days, been an inveterate gamester, and the once sacerdotal acres, where, in ancient times, a segregated community professed to live by the

rule of heaven, were now mortgaged to wellnigh their actual worth. The marquis was a proud, domineering aristocrat, exulting in heraldic hatchments, and tawdry splendour, one who would have been a meet companion of those Gallic monopolists, under the ancien regime. He deemed himself inherently, essentially different from those vulgar masses of the work-day world, with whom he was constrained to sometimes unpleasantly come in contact, and whom he regarded in pretty much the same light as Hungarian Magyars do the serfs of the soil, and southern planters George Harrises and Uncle Toms in these days. A cursory glance at the external man symbolled the character of the individual, and the observer saw, in his sensual face, and the attempted foppish finery of dress, one of the most melancholy pictures to be contemplated—that of an unreflecting old libertine, prematurely old, and who tries to ward off age by the aid of his tailor, and by mimicking the sprightliness and resiliency of youth.

Squanderfield had been bred at Eton, and