oe_. But grotesque as such ideas seem now, they were not more
grotesque than those shadowed forth in some of the novels of Lord
Beaconsfield, and more particularly in _Sybil, or The Two Nations_. Had
we indeed been set to compose an essay on the social conditions, as we
ourselves understood them, "The Two Nations" would have been the title
which we could most appropriately have selected for it.

When, however, forgetting our general principles, we gave our attention
to the adult relations and connections who, through personal
acquaintance or otherwise, constituted for us what is commonly called
society, our respect for many of them as "Normans" was appreciably
tempered by a sense of their dullness as men and women. They were nearly
all of them members of old Devonshire families, beyond the circle of
which their interests did not often wander. But certain of them in my
own memory stand out from the rest as interesting types of conditions
which by this time have passed away. Of these I may mention four--Emma
and Antony Buller, son and daughter of Sir Antony Buller of Pound; Lord
Blatchford, a Gladstonian Liberal, and the celebrated Henry Philpotts,
the then Bishop of Exeter.

Antony Buller, who was my godfather, was vicar of a parish on the
western borders of Dartmoor. In the fact that "remote from towns he ran
his godly race" he resembled the vicar described in "The Deserted
Village," but except for his godliness he resembled him in little else.
A model of secluded piety, he was educated at Eton and Christchurch;
unquestioning in his social as well as his Christian conservatism, and
expressing in the refinement of his voice and the well-bred
quasi-meekness of his bearing a sense of family connection, tempered by
a scholarly recognition of the equality of human souls. Lord
Blatchford, his not very distant neighbor, was in many ways an Antony
Buller secularized. His piety, polished by the classics and Oxford
chapels, was what was in those days called Liberal, rather than Tory.
What in Antony Buller was a conservative Christian meekness was in Lord
Blatchford a progressive Christian briskness; but his belief in popular
progress was accompanied by a smile at its incidents, as though it were
a kind of frisking to which the masses ought to be welcome so long as it
did not assume too practical a character or endanger any of the palings
within the limits of which it ought to be confined.

[Illustration: ROBERT BROWNING]

Emm