Kenelm Chillingly, Book 4.

n his rooms with Lord Thetford at that hour of three in the afternoon

Beaumanoirs have been Whigs from the time of William III. They have shared the good and the ill fortunes of a party which, whether we side with it or not, no politician who dreads extremes in the government of a State so pre-eminently artificial that a prevalent extreme at either end of the balance would be fatal to equilibrium, can desire to become extinct or feeble so long as a constitutional monarchy exists in England. From the reign of George I. to the death of George IV., the Beaumanoirs were in the ascendant. Visit their family portrait gallery, and you must admire the eminence of a house which, during that interval of less than a century, contributed so many men to the service of the State or the adornment of the Court,-so many Ministers, Ambassadors, Generals, Lord Chamberlains, and Masters of the Horse. When the younger Pitt beat the great Whig Houses, the Beaumanoirs vanish into comparative obscurity;

in Committees, he takes the chair at public meetings on sanitary questions or projects for social improvement, and acquits himself well therein. He has not yet spoken in debate, but he has only been two years in Parliament, and he takes his father's wise advice not to speak till the third. But he is not without weight among the well-born youth of the party, and has in him the stuff out of which, when it becomes seasoned, the Corinthian capitals of a Cabinet may be very

rew aside his cigar, "I quite understand that

can

or

or

ess inmate of body: it craves occupation of some sort, and regular occupation

my mind is always busying its

y way,-with no

ru

then it will have i

ressions, or inventing incidents, or investigating characters; and between you and me, I do not

mon with other people: come into Parliament,

ell me that you are not bor

nderstood out of it; but you may conceive its charm when you observe that a man who has once been in the thick of it feels forlorn and shelved i

nist, a Socialist, and wished to upset everything existing

lly in earnest against tho

in earnest against them? T

iples of my side, go with the other side. For my part, I and ma

as blind as itself. New ideas come beating into surf and surge against those which former reasoners had considered as fixed banks and breakwaters; and the new ideas are so mutable, so fickle, that those which were considered novel ten years ago are deemed obsolete to-day, and the new ones of to-day will in their turn be obsolete to-morrow. And, in a sort of fatalism, you see statesmen yielding way to these successive mockeries of experiment,-for they are experiments against ex

an, and has all the earnestness you

ll him

to the House of Commons, and succeed there, I hope he will never become my leader; for if he

ould he still b

its leader. Of course, if Gordon brought in a bill for the abolition of Christianity, it would be on the ple

ad of tempting me into the field of party politics, your talk leaves me in stolid

st truculently criticised in 'The Londoner,' but which I am assured, on good authority, is a work of remarkable merit. I can't bear to see a man snarled and sneered down, no doubt by jealous rivals, who have their influence in journals, so I shall judge of the picture for myself. If it be really as good as I am told, I shall talk

e into his saddle and riding briskly down the street,-in form and face and bearing a very model of young, high-born, high-bred manhood. "The Venetians," muttered Kenelm, "decapitate

an stationed before his window the stage on which Punch satirizes the la