ed
Mr. Harry's heart at the very notion; the honour of the family, of which
he was the chief, made it his duty to prevent so monstrous an alliance,
and to chastise the upstart who could dare to think of such an insult to
their house. 'Tis true Mr. Esmond often boasted of republican principles,
and could remember many fine speeches he had made at college and
elsewhere, with _worth_ and not _birth_ for a text: but Tom Tusher to take
the place of the noble Castlewood--faugh! 'twas as monstrous as King
Hamlet's widow taking off her weeds for Claudius. Esmond laughed at all
widows, all wives, all women; and were the banns about to be published, as
no doubt they were, that very next Sunday at Walcote Church, Esmond swore
that he would be present to shout No! in the face of the congregation, and
to take a private revenge upon the ears of the bridegroom.

Instead of going to dinner then at the "Rose" that night, Mr. Esmond bade
his servant pack a portmanteau and get horses, and was at Farnham,
half-way on the road to Walcote, thirty miles off, before his comrades had
got to their supper after the play. He bade his man give no hint to my
lady dowager's household of the expedition on which he was going: and as
Chelsey was distant from London, the roads bad, and infested by footpads,
and Esmond often in the habit, when engaged in a party of pleasure, of
lying at a friend's lodging in town, there was no need that his old aunt
should be disturbed at his absence--indeed, nothing more delighted the old
lady than to fancy that _mon cousin_, the incorrigible young sinner, was
abroad boxing the watch, or scouring St. Giles's. When she was not at her
books of devotion, she thought Etheridge and Sedley very good reading. She
had a hundred pretty stories about Rochester, Harry Jermyn, and Hamilton;
and if Esmond would but have run away with the wife even of a citizen,
'tis my belief she would have pawned her diamonds (the best of them went
to our Lady of Chaillot) to pay his damages.

My lord's little house of Walcote, which he inhabited before he took his
title and occupied the house of Castlewood--lies about a mile from
Winchester, and his widow had returned to Walcote after my lord's death as
a place always dear to her, and where her earliest and happiest days had
been spent, cheerfuller than Castlewood, which was too large for her
straitened means, and giving her, too, the protection of the ex-dean, her
father. The young viscount had a