and
clergymen remarkable for their eloquence, my humble aim is attained, and Maria
Newcome is not altogether useless in her generation. Will you take a little
refreshment? Allow your sister to go down to the dining-room supported by your
gallant arm.« She looked round to the admiring congregation, whereof Honeyman,
as it were, acted as clerk, and flirting her fan, and flinging up her little
head, Consummate Virtue walked down on the arm of the Colonel.
    The refreshment was rather meagre. The foreign artists generally dashed
downstairs, and absorbed all the ices, creams, etc. To those coming late there
were chicken bones, table-cloths puddled with melted ice, glasses hazy with
sherry, and broken bits of bread. The Colonel said he never supped, and he and
Honeyman walked away together, the former to bed, the latter, I am sorry to say,
to his club; for he was a dainty feeder, and loved lobster, and talk late at
night, and a comfortable little glass of something wherewith to conclude the
day.
    He agreed to come to breakfast with the Colonel, who named eight or nine for
the meal. Nine Mr. Honeyman agreed to with a sigh. The incumbent of Lady
Whittlesea's chapel seldom rose before eleven. For to tell the truth, no French
abbé of Louis XV. was more lazy and luxurious, and effeminate, than our polite
bachelor preacher.
    One of Colonel Newcome's fellow-passengers from India was Mr. James Binnie
of the Civil Service, a jolly young bachelor of two or three and forty, who,
having spent half of his past life in Bengal, was bent upon enjoying the
remainder in Britain or in Europe, if a residence at home should prove agreeable
to him. The nabob of books and tradition is a personage no longer to be found
among us. He is neither as wealthy nor as wicked as the jaundiced monster of
romances and comedies, who purchases the estates of broken- English gentlemen
with rupees tortured out of bleeding rajahs, who smokes a hookah in public, and
in private carries about a guilty conscience, diamonds of untold value, and a
diseased liver; who has a vulgar wife, with a retinue of black servants whom she
maltreats, and a gentle son and daughter with good impulses and an imperfect
education, desirous to amend their own and their parents' lives, and thoroughly
ashamed of the follies of the old people. If you go to the house of an Indian
gentleman now, he does not say, »Bring more curricles,« like the famous Nabob of
Stanstead