“Our baronets of late appear to be
    Unjustly snubbed and talked and written down;
    Partly from follies of Sir Something Brown,
  Stickling for badges due to their degree,
    And partly that their honor’s late editions
    Have been much swelled with surgeons and physicians;
  For ‘honor hath small skill in surgery,’
  And skill in surgery small honor.”—­p. 17.

What “honor” is here meant? and against whom is the taunt implied?—­against the “surgeons and physicians,” or against the depreciation of them.  Surely the former can hardly have been intended.  The sentence will bear to be cleared of some ambiguity, or else to be cleared off altogether.

Our introduction to Sir Reginald Mohun, Lord of Nornyth Place, and of “an income clear of 20,000 pounds,” and to his friends Raymond St. Oun, De Lacy, Wilton, Tancarville, and Vivian—­(for the author’s names are aristocratic, like his predilections)—­is effected through the medium of a stanza, new, we believe, in arrangement, though differing but slightly from the established octave, and of verses so easy and flowing as to make us wonder less at the promise of

    “provision plenty
  For cantos twelve, or may be, four and twenty,”

than at Mr. Cayley’s assertion that he “Can never get along at all in prose.”

The incidents, as might be expected of a first canto, are neither many nor important, and will admit of compression into a very small compass.

Sir Reginald, whose five friends had arrived at Nornyth Place late on the preceding night, is going over the grounds with them in a shooting party after a late breakfast.  St. Oun expresses a wish to “prowl about the place” in preference, not feeling in the mood for the required exertion.

  “’Of lazy dogs the laziest ever fate
    Set on two useless legs you surely are,
    And born beneath some wayward sauntering star
  To sit for ever swinging on a gate,
    And laugh at wiser people passing through.’ 
    So spake the bard De Lacy:  for they two
  In frequent skirmishes of fierce debate
  Would bicker, tho’ their mutual love was great.”—­p. 35.

Mohun, however, sides with St. Oun, and agrees to escort him in his rambles after the first few shots.  He accordingly soon resigns his gun to the keeper Oswald, whose position as one who

        “came into possession
  Of the head-keepership by due succession
  Thro’ sire and grandsire, who, when one was dead,
  Left his right heir-male keeper in his stead,”

Mr. Cayley evidently regards with some complacence.  The friends enter a boat:  here, while sailing along a rivulet that winds through the estate, St. Oun falls to talking of wealth, its value and insufficiency, of death, and life, and fame; and coming at length to ask after the history of Sir Reginald’s past life, he suggests “this true epic opening for relation:”