their island mother's mind. If there is a
balance to be righted, she leaves that business to society, and if it be
the season for the gathering of society, it will be righted more or less;
and if no righting is done at all, perhaps the Press will incidentally
toss a leaf of laurel on a name or two: thus in the exercise of grumbling
doing good.

With few exceptions, Nevil Beauchamp's heroes received the motto instead
of the sweetmeat. England expected them to do their duty; they did it,
and she was not dissatisfied, nor should they be. Beauchamp, at a
distance from the scene, chafed with customary vehemence, concerning the
unjust measure dealt to his favourites: Captain Hardist, of the Diomed,
twenty years a captain, still a captain! Young Michell denied the cross!
Colonel Evans Cuff, on the heights from first to last, and not advanced a
step! But Prancer, and Plunger, and Lammakin were thoroughly well taken
care of, this critic of the war wrote savagely, reviving an echo of a
queer small circumstance occurring in the midst of the high dolour and
anxiety of the whole nation, and which a politic country preferred to
forget, as we will do, for it was but an instance of strong family
feeling in high quarters; and is not the unity of the country founded on
the integrity of the family sentiment? Is it not certain, which the
master tells us, that a line is but a continuation of a number of dots?
Nevil Beauchamp was for insisting that great Government officers had paid
more attention to a dot or two than to the line. He appeared to be at war
with his country after the peace. So far he had a lively ally in his
uncle Everard; but these remarks of his were a portion of a letter, whose
chief burden was the request that Everard Romfrey would back him in
proposing for the hand of a young French lady, she being, Beauchamp
smoothly acknowledged, engaged to a wealthy French marquis, under the
approbation of her family. Could mortal folly outstrip a petition of that
sort? And apparently, according to the wording and emphasis of the
letter, it was the mature age of the marquis which made Mr. Beauchamp so
particularly desirous to stop the projected marriage and take the girl
himself. He appealed to his uncle on the subject in a 'really--really'
remonstrative tone, quite overwhelming to read. 'It ought not to be
permitted: by all the laws of chivalry, I should write to the girl's
father to interdict it: I really am particeps criminis in a si