CONTENTS OF VOL. XXXII. Argot of Polite Society, The . II. A Breeze in the Boat IV. The Shay-le. v. The Informer VI. The Garden at Richmond VII. A Bargain Ratified VIII. Mother and Daughter . Celestials under the Stars and Stripes. By JOSEPH HATTON 'Drip! Drip! Drip!' By HENRY S. LEIGH Eheu Fugaces! By C. A. WARD Flower and the Form, The. By RICHARD DOWLING Golf Stories Homes and Haunts of the Italian Poets: I. Dante. By T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE . II. Petrarch. By FRANCES ELEANOR TROLLOPE Hutchinson, Lucy. By JAMES HUTTON. Italian Opera in England, The. By II. BARTON BAKER 249 Legendary Stories of Argyllshire Rocks and Caves. By CUTHBERT BEDE 323 Life's Dawn Lisa. By RICHARD DOWLING Lord of Harpington, The. By JAMES PAYN Memory, Memory, faithful be! By. W. C. BENNETT Mystery of the Pyramids, The. By RICHARD A. PROCTOR BELGRAVIA MARCH 1877. The World Well Lost. BY E. LYNN LINTON. CHAPTER VII. HIS LATEST CRAZE. AD Guy Perceval had a good manner and a fine presence HAPA that is, had he been what an American would have called a magnetic man-he would have been an invaluable possession to the neighbourhood, being the one man at Grantley Bourne who took up new ideas and endeavoured to improve on old methods of living. But as he took up these ideas less wisely than warmly, and rode his hobbies straight against venerated prejudices and timehonoured superstitions, without allowing time for gradual change or growth—and as he was a small man with a thin voice, an ungraceful figure, a bad manner, and a nervous laugh-he gained no honour in his own neighbourhood, but fulfilled the fate accorded to local prophets, and was laughed at in proportion to his zeal and scouted in direct measure with his truth. The only thing that kept him from absolute social excommunication was, that he was Mr. Perceval of the Manor, owner of a fine old mansion perfumed by a few historical traditions, and possessor of a rent-roll of some fifteen thousand a year. Being so grandly framed, his follies to some, to others his dangerous innovations, were excused in public and laughed at in private; and if he would not have been tolerated for himself alone, for the sake of his surroundings he was welcomed with effusion, according to the way of society and human nature in general. He was an example in his own person of the worthlessness of intrinsic qualities, and the power possessed by externals. He had zeal and intelligence ;-which went for nothing because he was destitute of personal charm; but he had wealth;-and this was the ballast which kept the whole thing from capsizing. He might lay down the lines of a higher law and a wiser method VOL. XXXII. NO. CXXV. B than any by which the people of Grantley Bourne had yet lived; but if he laid them down in a high-pitched voice, his arm sawing the air like a pump-handle, and his head thrown back so far that his face was foreshortened to a chin and two nostrils, of what good were they to a fastidious generation which demands to be amused if it consents to be taught, and requires to be flattered if it is to be led? The value of plain living and high thinking might be incalculable, but it would have to be demonstrated by a more personable professor than Guy Perceval, and one whose demonstrations would not set your teeth on edge when he made them. And when he advocated scientific arrangements in ventilation, drainage, food, or the like, the people who had never looked to a stuffed chimney nor a waste-pipe, and had cooked and eaten by the light of nature and not according to the teaching of chemical analysis, held him as far gone as man could be whom it was not dangerous to suffer to be at large. They had not died of typhus, neither they nor their forbears; and it was just folly to try to frighten them now with a dust-bin here or a cesspool there. Still, Mr. Perceval was Mr. Perceval, with pretty pickings to dispense among the faithful. Wherefore the poor made up a sham compliance which was the veriest sham possible, and the rich affected intellectual adhesion, but for various causes, always beyond their control, refused to follow on his lead, and left him the barren honour of lonely supremacy in the ways of wisdom. When he declaimed against the close foliage that made Owlett like a nest, and urged on Mrs. Smith to lay the whole place bare, replanting with pines and blue-gums if she must plant at all, she, who never argued, contented herself with saying quietly: 'I dare say it would be better, but I have not the heart to do it;' listening as quietly to a rather bitter discourse on the evil of knowing the better thing and refraining from doing it. Wherein Mr. Perceval was decidedly in the right, but none the more obeyed. When he talked of the sin of unhealthy marriages, people thought him indelicate to introduce into that question any other considerations but those of love or money; and said that it would be very hard on the poor things who had scrofula or madness in their blood if they were not allowed to marry where they loved; and Mr. Perceval was talking on subjects which he did not understand and had better leave alone. When he made war against such superstitions as, that the poker draws up the fire and the sunlight puts it out-taking these as types-the housekeepers by rule of thumb tossed their heads, and said that practical experience goes farther than scientific theory any day, and that Mr. |