. Bayham's criticism on these performances, it
need not be said, was tremendous. Since the days of Michael Angelo you would
have thought there never had been such drawings. In fact, F.B., as some other
critics do, clapped his friends so boisterously on the back, and trumpeted their
merits with such prodigious energy, as to make his friends themselves sometimes
uneasy.
    Mr. Clive - whose good father was writing home more and more wonderful
accounts of the Bundelcund Bank, in which he had engaged, and who was always
pressing his son to draw for more money - treated himself to comfortable rooms
at Paris, in the very same hotel where the young Marquis of Farintosh occupied
lodgings much more splendid, and where he lived, no doubt, so as to be near the
professor, who was still teaching his lordship the polka. Indeed it must be said
that Lord Farintosh made great progress under this artist, and that he danced
very much better in his third season than in the first and second years after he
had come upon the town. From the same instructor the Marquis learned the latest
novelties in French conversation, the choicest oaths and phrases (for which she
was famous); so that, although his French grammar was naturally defective, he
was enabled to order a dinner at Philippe's, and to bully a waiter or curse a
hackney coachman with extreme volubility. A young nobleman of his rank was
received with the distinction which was his due by the French sovereign of that
period; and at the Tuileries, and the houses of the French nobility which he
visited, Monsieur le Marquis de Farintosh excited considerable remark by the use
of some of the phrases which his young professor had taught to him. People even
went so far as to say that the Marquis was an awkward and dull young man, of the
very worst manners.
    Whereas the young Clive Newcome - and it comforted the poor fellow's heart
somewhat, and be sure pleased Ethel, who was looking on at his triumphs - was
voted the most charming young Englishman who had been seen for a long time in
our salons. Madame de Florac, who loved him as a son of her own, actually went
once or twice into the world in order to see his début. Madame de Montcontour
inhabited a part of the Hôtel de Florac, and received society there. The French
people did not understand what bad English she talked, though they comprehended
Lord Farintosh's French blunders. »Monsieur Newcome is an artist! What a noble
career!« cries a great French lady, the wife of a
