day. Pouf! the old estates and the old name are
powder. Ascend higher. Take nobles whose
ancestral titles ought to be to English ears like
the sound of clarions, awakening the most slothful
to the scorn of money-bags and the passion for renown.
Lo! in that mocking dance of death called the Progress
of the Age, one who did not find Enough in a sovereign’s
revenue, and seeks The Little More as a gambler on
the turf by the advice of blacklegs! Lo! another,
with lands wider than his greatest ancestors ever possessed,
must still go in for The Little More, adding acre to
acre, heaping debt upon debt! Lo! a third, whose
name, borne by his ancestors, was once the terror
of England’s foes,—the landlord of
a hotel! A fourth,—but why go on through
the list? Another and another still succeeds;
each on the Road to Ruin, each in the Age of Progress.
Ah, Miss Travers! in the old time it was through the
Temple of Honour that one passed to the Temple of
Fortune. In this wise age the process is reversed.
But here comes your father.”
“A thousand pardons!” said Leopold Travers.
“That numskull Mondell kept me so long with
his old-fashioned Tory doubts whether liberal politics
are favourable to agricultural prospects. But
as he owes a round sum to a Whig lawyer I had to talk
with his wife, a prudent woman; convinced her that
his own agricultural prospects were safest on the
Whig side of the question; and, after kissing his baby
and shaking his hand, booked his vote for George Belvoir,—a
plumper.”
“I suppose,” said Kenelm to himself, and
with that candour which characterized him whenever
he talked to himself, “that Travers has taken
the right road to the Temple, not of Honour, but of
honours, in every country, ancient or modern, which
has adopted the system of popular suffrage.”
THE next day Mrs. Campion and Cecilia were seated
under the veranda. They were both ostensibly
employed on two several pieces of embroidery, one
intended for a screen, the other for a sofa-cushion;
but the mind of neither was on her work.
MRS. CAMPION.—“Has Mr. Chillingly
said when he means to take leave?”
CECILIA.—“Not to me. How much
my dear father enjoys his conversation!”
MRS. CAMPION.—“Cynicism and mockery
were not so much the fashion among young men in your
father’s day as I suppose they are now, and
therefore they seem new to Mr. Travers. To me
they are not new, because I saw more of the old than
the young when I lived in London, and cynicism and
mockery are more natural to men who are leaving the
world than to those who are entering it.”
CECILIA.—“Dear Mrs. Campion, how
bitter you are, and how unjust! You take much
too literally the jesting way in which Mr. Chillingly
expresses himself. There can be no cynicism in
one who goes out of his way to make others happy.”
MRS. CAMPION.—“You mean in the whim
of making an ill-assorted marriage between a pretty
village flirt and a sickly cripple, and settling a
couple of peasants in a business for which they are
wholly unfitted.”
