upright country gentlemen--to be found, with scarcely an exception, on
the side of political liberty, and of a Whiggish religion; men who had
given their sons to die at Quebec, and Plassy, and Trafalgar, for the
making of England's Empire; who would have voted with Fox, but that the
terrors of Burke, and a dogged sense that the country must be carried
on, drove them into supporting Pitt; who, at home, dispensed alternate
justice and doles, and when their wives died put up inscriptions to them
intended to bear witness at once to the Latinity of a Boyce's
education, and the pious strength of his legitimate affections--a
tedious race perhaps and pig-headed, tyrannical too here and there, but
on the whole honourable English stuff--the stuff which has made, and
still in new forms sustains, the fabric of a great state.

Only once was there a break in the uniform character of the monuments--a
break corresponding to the highest moment of the Boyce fortunes, a
moment when the respectability of the family rose suddenly into
brilliance, and the prose of generations broke into a few years of
poetry. Somewhere in the last century an earlier Richard Boyce went
abroad to make the grand tour. He was a man of parts, the friend of
Horace Walpole and of Gray, and his introductions opened to him whatever
doors he might wish to enter, at a time when the upper classes of the
leading European nations were far more intimately and familiarly
acquainted with each other than they are now. He married at Rome an
Italian lady of high birth and large fortune. Then he brought her home
to Mellor, where straightway the garden front was built with all its
fantastic and beautiful decoration, the great avenue was planted,
pictures began to invade the house, and a musical library was collected
whereof the innumerable faded volumes, bearing each of them the entwined
names of Richard and Marcella Boyce, had been during the last few weeks
mines of delight and curiosity to the Marcella of to-day.