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28 steeped as thoroughly as, had he been brought up by precisians, he would have craved and loved it. He saw men levelled with brutes, and made far more bestial than the beasts; and his nature reared itself out of the slough, and refused the slavery of sensuality. If he were too early contaminated, he was all the earlier revolted.

When he was twenty-two his father died; and he was left the last Master of King's Best (by the old title long dropped in desuetude), with some miles of moorland and a beggared fortune, not a single relative, and not a chance of a career. A certain wild and witty peer, who had been prominent in the orgies of the Roissy of the Border—saying nothing to him, for the Erceldoune stock was famous for a pride, which perished rather than bend—got him offered a messengership; and his first meeting with officials at the Foreign Office was characteristic, and had not a little influence on his career. In the Board-room, at the hour when he was being received by those sleepy and solemn personages the Heads of a Department, there lounged in a minister, as celebrated for his cheery and facetious humour as for his successful and indomitable statesmanship; for his off-hand good nature as for his foreign policies. The Heads bowed submissive