we can ever call necessary, the poor must be contented. He sees that.
I shall not run the risk of angering you by writing to defend him, unless
I hear of his being shamefully mishandled, and the bearer of an old name
can be of service to him. I cannot say less, and will say no more.'

Everard apostrophized his absent nephew: 'You jackass!'

I am reminded by Mr. Romfrey's profound disappointment in the youth, that
it will be repeatedly shared by many others: and I am bound to forewarn
readers of this history that there is no plot in it. The hero is
chargeable with the official disqualification of constantly offending
prejudices, never seeking to please; and all the while it is upon him the
narrative hangs. To be a public favourite is his last thought.
Beauchampism, as one confronting him calls it, may be said to stand for
nearly everything which is the obverse of Byronism, and rarely woos your
sympathy, shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any kind of posturing. For
Beauchamp will not even look at happiness to mourn its absence; melodious
lamentations, demoniacal scorn, are quite alien to him. His faith is in
working and fighting. With every inducement to offer himself for a
romantic figure, he despises the pomades and curling-irons of modern
romance, its shears and its labels: in fine, every one of those positive
things by whose aid, and by some adroit flourishing of them, the nimbus
known as a mysterious halo is produced about a gentleman's head. And a
highly alluring adornment it is! We are all given to lose our solidity
and fly at it; although the faithful mirror of fiction has been showing
us latterly that a too superhuman beauty has disturbed popular belief in
the bare beginnings of the existence of heroes: but this, very likely, is
nothing more than a fit of Republicanism in the nursery, and a deposition
of the leading doll for lack of variety in him. That conqueror of
circumstances will, the dullest soul may begin predicting, return on his