Christ Church. Endowed with talents above the common order, and having a natural gift for the acquisition of languages, he came out a first class man, and unquestionably might, had he desired, have added lustre to an ennobled name; but with the termination of his curriculum ended his studious pursuits. In order to give the coup de grace to his education, he made a tour through Greece and the Holy Land, and then returned under the assuring conviction, that he had seen, what in common parlance, is termed the world.

Unlike many fiery and impetuous spirits of his age, he had no taste for military renown. The social convulsions which had for wellnigh a quarter of a century shaken Europe to the centre, and the many fields which had formed theatres for the brave and adventurous, were little regarded by him. The campaigns of the Peninsula and the glories of Waterloo, lighted up no emulative scintillations in his bosom. The example of the father produced its very probable consequences on the character of the son. He dressed fashionably, lounged elegantly, swore aristo

cratically, got into debt, prated ad nauseam of the prerogatives of his order, and vauntingly declared that as soon as he found a continued round of dissipation undermining his health, he would marry some rich heiress to be his nurse, and preside over the inevitable quiet of a rural home.

His notions on the rights and privileges of peers were, indeed, insanely extravagant. Inflated with pride, and from his earliest years having heard the language of disdain and hauteur from his father, it is not to be wondered at, how perverted and absurd the tenour of his mind had become; and when seen amonst a group of quidnuncs on the steps of the Carlton, in the dress boxes with beauties at the opera, or carousing with fast men at Brooke's or Boodle's, verily did he deem himself as of a more exalted nature, and, in his inmost essentials, superior to the vulgar myriads, whose heritage was business and toil.

During the season when dowager match makers gave entertainments to debutantes and elder sons, and when queening duchesses

filled their saloons with all the rank and fashion of the metropolis, Squanderfield was ever to be seen fluttering about like the painted butterfly from flower to flower, and talking insipid nothings, and slanting flatteries, to bashful belles and young ladies of forty-five! Every August he repaired to Caithness to shoot with an old Etonian, and for a few years his Novembers and Decembers were agreeably got over, by honouring a wealthy commoner with his presence at Melton, and who was once master of the Quorn. It was in London that he became acquainted with Puffendoff, and as their tastes were in many things in common, a mere how-do-ye-do intimacy, soon ripened into a constant companionship-Of the ultimate nature of that companionship the reader already knows.

In the charming vale of Mid-Kent, that county from time immemorial renowned for fertility, where spring in early gladness puts forth her opening blossoms and green leaves, and where flaunting summer flowers exhibit their deep tints and lingering bloom, and where the

hop-groves flourish, and the golden harvest yields its abundant stores, and where meadows, and trees, and corn land extend mile after mile, without the intervention of one sterile patch; there might, some fifty or sixty years ago, have been seen, in its newly-reared freshness, a pagodal, balcony-flanked building, in no feature harmonizing with the huge, sombre, matter-of-fact edifices constituting the rural homes of the magnates and squirarchy in that part of the country. This singular residence was, to the traveller, a kind of anomaly in domestic architecture, and many were the questions asked relative to its owner, and the origin of that verandahed and uncongenial fabric. Its site had been selected with more than common care, and it was, indeed, a happy selection. Standing not on the summit, but the side of a hill, and so placed, that from the front windows a charming view was caught of at least three fourths of the vale, the ravished eye gazed upon the panorama, with a soul-roused, loving admiration. The flower garden, which had a southern aspect, was circumvented by

VOL. III.

lofty buttressed brick walls, and transversely intersected into terraces or small plateaus, the divisions being breasted with fancy masonry of polished Caen stone. These terraces agreeably broke the bosom of the hill, from the dwelling to the foot of the eminence, and at the base ran, through a sedgy bed, a sparkling and pellucid stream, bright, as if its clear wavelets had sprung from the chalky caverns of Sussex Downs, and unlike the turbid, ferruginous waters commonly noticed in Kent.

At a cursory glance it was manifest, that the proprietor had bestowed much solicitude on the various horticultural specimens, as every flower, every shrub, every tree were trained with exactitude, and looked thriving and vigorous. Here and there were plants, at a glance non-indigenous, and as you peeped into a fantastically formed conservatory the brilliant hues of a crowd of exotics, of a thousand glowing dyes, indicated at once that they had come from the climes of the sun.

The internal fittings up and furniture of