from derision by
joining the extravagance.

He was well inspired. It was popularly felt to be the supreme of
clever-nay, noble-fencing. Really noble, though the cleverness was
conspicuous. A defensive stroke, protecting him against his fair one's
violent charge of horse, warded off an implied attack upon Old England,
in Old England's best-humoured easy manner.

Supposing the earl to have acted otherwise, his countess would virtually
have ridden over him, and wild Wales have cast a shadow on the chivalry
of magisterial England. He and his country stood to meet the issue
together the moment the Countess of Fleetwood and her escort crossed
the Welsh border; when it became a question between the hot-hearted,
at their impetuous gallop, and the sedatively minded, in an unfortified
camp of arm-chairs. The earl's adroitness, averting a collision fatal or
discomforting to both, disengaged him from an incumbent odium, of which,
it need hardly be stated, neither the lady nor her attendant cavaliers
had any notion at the hour of the assembly for the start for England on
the bridge of Pont-y-pridd. The hungry mother had the safety of her babe
in thought. The hotheaded Welshmen were sworn to guard their heroine.

That is the case presented by the Dame's papers, when the incredible
is excised. She claims the being a good friend to fiction in feeding
popular voracity with all her stores. But the Old Buccaneer, no
professed friend to it, is a sounder guide in the maxim, where he says:
Deliver yourself by permit of your cheque on the 'Bank of Reason, and
your account is increased instead of lessened.

Our account with credulity, he would signify.

The Dame does not like the shaking for a sifting. Romance, however, is
not a mountain made of gold, but a vein running some way through; and it
must be engineered, else either we are filled with wind from swallowing
indigestible substance, or we consent to a debasing of the currency,
which means her to-morrow's bankruptcy; and the spectacle of Romance in
the bankruptcy court degrades us (who believe we are allied to her) as
cruelly as it appals. It gives the cynic licence to bark day and night
for an entire generation.

Surely the Countess of Fleetwood's drive from the Welsh borders to
Esslemont, accompanied by the chosen of the land, followed by the vivats
of the whole Principality, and England gaping to hear the stages of
her progress, may be held sufficiently romantic without stuffing