cockhorse to favour and authority. Meantime the exhibition of a hero
whom circumstances overcome, and who does not weep or ask you for a tear,
who continually forfeits attractiveness by declining to better his own
fortunes, must run the chances of a novelty during the interregnum.
Nursery Legitimists will be against him to a man; Republicans likewise,
after a queer sniff at his pretensions, it is to be feared. For me, I
have so little command over him, that in spite of my nursery tastes, he
drags me whither he lists. It is artless art and monstrous innovation to
present so wilful a figure, but were I to create a striking fable for
him, and set him off with scenic effects and contrasts, it would be only
a momentary tonic to you, to him instant death. He could not live in
such an atmosphere. The simple truth has to be told: how he loved his
country, and for another and a broader love, growing out of his first
passion, fought it; and being small by comparison, and finding no giant
of the Philistines disposed to receive a stone in his fore-skull,
pummelled the obmutescent mass, to the confusion of a conceivable epic.
His indifferent England refused it to him. That is all I can say. The
greater power of the two, she seems, with a quiet derision that does not
belie her amiable passivity, to have reduced in Beauchamp's career the
boldest readiness for public action, and some good stout efforts besides,
to the flat result of an optically discernible influence of our hero's
character in the domestic circle; perhaps a faintly-outlined circle or
two beyond it. But this does not forbid him to be ranked as one of the
most distinguishing of her children of the day he lived in. Blame the
victrix if you think he should have been livelier.


Nevil soon had to turn his telescope from politics. The torch of war was
actually lighting, and he was not fashioned to be heedless of what
surrounded him. Our diplomacy, after dancing with all the suppleness of