care for,« and
he strode off, naming a farm five miles distant. Dr. Corney howled an invitation
to early breakfast to him, in the event of his passing on his way back, and
retired to bed to think of him. The result of a variety of conjectures caused
him to set Vernon down as Miss Middleton's knight, and he felt a strong
compassion for his poor friend. »Though,« thought he, »a hopeless attachment is
as pretty an accompaniment to the tune of life as a gentleman might wish to
have, for it's one of those big doses of discord which make all the minor ones
fit in like an agreeable harmony, and so he shuffles along as pleasantly as the
fortune-favoured, when they come to compute!«
    Sir Willoughby was the fortune-favoured in the little doctor's mind; that
high-stepping gentleman having wealth, and public consideration, and the most
ravishing young lady in the world for a bride. Still, though he reckoned all
these advantages enjoyed by Sir Willoughby at their full value, he could imagine
the ultimate balance of good fortune to be in favour of Vernon. But to do so, he
had to reduce the whole calculation to the extreme abstract, and feed his lean
friend, as it were, on dew and roots; and the happy effect for Vernon lay in a
distant future, on the borders of old age, where he was to be blest with his
lady's regretful preference, and rejoice in the fruits of good constitutional
habits. The reviewing mind was Irish. Sir Willoughby was a character of man
profoundly opposed to Dr. Corney's nature; the latter's instincts bristled with
antagonism - not to his race, for Vernon was of the same race, partly of the
same blood, and Corney loved him: the type of person was the annoyance. And the
circumstance of its prevailing successfulness in the country where he was
placed, while it held him silent as if under a law, heaped stores of insurgency
in the Celtic bosom. Corney contemplating Sir Willoughby, and a trotting kern
governed by Strongbow, have a point of likeness between them; with the point of
difference, that Corney was enlightened to know of a friend better adapted for
eminent station, and especially better adapted to please a lovely lady - could
these highbred Englishwomen but be taught to conceive another idea of manliness
than the formal carved-in-wood idol of their national worship!
    Dr. Corney breakfasted very early, without seeing Vernon. He was off to a
patient while the first lark of