you for a tear, who
continually forfeits attractiveness by declining to better his own fortunes,
must run the chances of a novelty during the interregnum. Nursery Legitimists
will be against him to a man; Republicans likewise, after a queer sniff at his
pretensions, it is to be feared. For me, I have so little command over him, that
in spite of my nursery tastes, he drags me whither he lists. It is artless art
and monstrous innovation to present so wilful a figure, but were I to create a
striking fable for him, and set him off with scenic effects and contrasts, it
would be only a momentary tonic to you, to him instant death. He could not live
in such an atmosphere. The simple truth has to be told: how he loved his
country, and for another and a broader love, growing out of his first passion,
fought it; and being small by comparison, and finding no giant of the
Philistines disposed to receive a stone in his fore-skull, pummelled the
obmutescent mass, to the confusion of a conceivable epic. His indifferent
England refused it to him. That is all I can say. The greater power of the two,
she seems, with a quiet derision that does not belie her amiable passivity, to
have reduced in Beauchamp's career the boldest readiness for public action, and
some good stout efforts besides, to the flat result of an optically discernible
influence of our hero's character in the domestic circle; perhaps a
faintly-outlined circle or two beyond it. But this does not forbid him to be
ranked as one of the most distinguishing of her children of the day he lived in.
Blame the victrix if you think he should have been livelier.
 
Nevil soon had to turn his telescope from politics. The torch of war was
actually lighting, and he was not fashioned to be heedless of what surrounded
him. Our diplomacy, after dancing with all the suppleness of stilts, gravely
resigned the gift of motion. Our dauntless Lancastrian thundered like a tempest
over a gambling tent, disregarded. Our worthy people, consenting to the doctrine
that war is a scourge, contracted the habit of thinking it, in this case, the
dire necessity which is the sole excuse for giving way to an irritated
pugnacity, and sucked the comforting caramel of an alliance with their
troublesome next-door neighbour, profuse in comfits as in scorpions. Nevil
detected that politic element of their promptitude for war. His recollections of
dissatisfaction in former days assisted him to perceive the nature of it, but he
was too young to hold his own