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332 child, was a melancholy contrast, not only to his grandsire, but to the general character of his progenitors. Before his time every head of the House had done something for it—even the most frivolous had contributed; one had collected the pictures, another the statues, a third the medals, a fourth had amassed the famous Vipont library; while others had at kast married heiresses, or augmented, through ducal lines, the splendor of the interminable cousinhood. The present marquis was literally nil. The pith of the Viponts was not in him. He looked well, he dressed well; if life were only the dumb show of a tableau, he would have been a paragon of a Marquis. But he was like the watches we give to little children, with a pretty gilt dial- plate, and no works in them. He was thoroughly inert—there Was no winding him up; he could not manage his property— he could not answer his letters—very few of them could he even read through. Politics did not interest him, nor literature, nor field-sports. He shot, it is true, but mechanically—wondering, perhaps, why he did shoot. He attended races, because the House of Vipont kept a racing stud. He bet on his own horses; but if they lost, showed no vexation. Admirers (no Marquis of Montfort could be wholly without them) said: " What fine temper! what good-breeding!" it was nothing but constitutional apathy. No one could call him a bad man—he was not a profligate, an oppressor, a miser, a spendthrift; he would not have taken the trouble to be a bad man on any account. Those who beheld his character at a distance would have called him an exemplary man. The more conspicuous duties of his station, subscriptions, charities, the maintenance of grand establish- ments, the encouragement of the line arts, were virtues admirably performed for him by others. But the phlegm or nullity of his being was not, after all, so complete as I have made it, per- haps, appear. He had one susceptibility which is more com- mon with women than with men—the susceptibility to pique. His amour propre was unforgiving—pique that, and he could do a rash thing, a foolish thing, a spiteful thing—pique that, and, prodigious! the watch went! He had a rooted pique against his marchioness. Apparently he had conceived this pique from the very first. He showed it passively by supreme neglect; he showed it actively by removing her from all the spheres of pow- er which naturally fall to the wife when the husband shuns the details of business. Evidently he had a dread lest any one should say, " Lady Montfort iniiuences my lord." Accordingly, not only the management of his estates fell to Carr Vipont, but even of his gardens, his household, his domestic arrange-