nd cheerful--a fine man in the bright noon of life, whom Daniel
thought absolutely perfect, and whose place was one of the finest in
England, at once historical; romantic, and home-like: a picturesque
architectural outgrowth from an abbey, which had still remnants of the
old monastic trunk. Diplow lay in another county, and was a
comparatively landless place which had come into the family from a rich
lawyer on the female side who wore the perruque of the restoration;
whereas the Mallingers had the grant of Monk's Topping under Henry the
Eighth, and ages before had held the neighboring lands of King's
Topping, tracing indeed their origin to a certain Hugues le Malingre,
who came in with the Conqueror--and also apparently with a sickly
complexion which had been happily corrected in his descendants. Two
rows of these descendants, direct and collateral, females of the male
line, and males of the female, looked down in the gallery over the
cloisters on the nephew Daniel as he walked there: men in armor with
pointed beards and arched eyebrows, pinched ladies in hoops and ruffs
with no face to speak of; grave-looking men in black velvet and stuffed
hips, and fair, frightened women holding little boys by the hand;
smiling politicians in magnificent perruques, and ladies of the
prize-animal kind, with rosebud mouths and full eyelids, according to
Lely; then a generation whose faces were revised and embellished in the
taste of Kneller; and so on through refined editions of the family
types in the time of Reynolds and Romney, till the line ended with Sir
Hugo and his younger brother Henleigh. This last had married Miss
Grandcourt, and taken her name along with her estates, thus making a
junction between two equally old families, impaling the three Saracens'
heads proper and three bezants of the one with the tower and falcons
_argent_ of the other, and, as it happened, uniting their highest
advantages in the prospects of that Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt who
is at present more of an acquaintance to us than either Sir Hugo or his
nephew Daniel Deronda.

In Sir Hugo's youthful portrait with rolled collar and high cravat, Sir
Thomas Lawrence had done justice to the agreeable alacrity of
expression and sanguine temperament still to be seen in the original,
but had done something more than justice in slightly lengthening the
nose, which was in reality shorter than might have been expected in a
Mallinger. Happily the appropriate nose of