anner was unexceptionably good and pleasing. Both the Earl and his
daughter had lived too long amongst those greatly inferior to them
in rank and fortune not to conceive a very exaggerated estimate of
themselves.

No Pasha was ever more absolute than my Lord in the little village
beside him; his will was a sort of firman that none dreamed of
disputing; and, indeed, the place men occupied in the esteem of their
fellows there, was little else than a reflex of how they were regarded
at the Hermitage. We never scruple to bestow a sort of derisive pity
upon the savage who, having carved his deity out of a piece of wood,
sits down to worship him; and yet, what an unconscious imitation of the
red man is all our adulation of great folks! We follow him to the very
letter, not only in investing the object of our worship with a hundred
qualities that he has not, but we make him the butt of our evil
passions, and in the day of our anger and disappointment we turn round
and rend him! Not that the villagers ever treated my Lord in this
wise,--they were still in the stage "of worship;" they had been at
"their offices," fathers and grandfathers, for many a year, and though
some were beginning to complain that their knees were getting sore, none
dreamed of getting on their legs! The fact was, that even they who liked
the religion least thought it was not worth while abjuring the faith of
their fathers, especially when they could not guess what was to replace
it; and so my Lord dictated and decided and pronounced for the
whole neighborhood; and Lady Augusta doctored and model-schooled and
loan-funded them to her heart's content. Nay, we are wrong! It was all
in the disappointed dreariness of an unsatisfied heart that she took to
benevolence! Oh, dear! what a sorry search is that after motives, if one
only knew how much philanthropy and active charity have come of a
breach of promise to marry! Not that Lady Augusta had ever stood in this
position, but either that she had looked too high, or was too hard to
please, or from some other cause, but she never married.

The man who has no taste for horsemanship consoles himself for the
unenjoyed pleasure by reading of the fractured ribs and smashed
collar-bones of the hunting-field. Was it in something of this spirit
that Lady Augusta took an especial delight in dwelling in her mind and
in her letters on all the disagreeables of her sisters' wedded life? The
extravagance of men, their selfishne