. Beautiful! beautiful! But why the mischief did Mr. Godfrey keep
it all to his lady and himself?

Mr. Franklin again--surely, you will say, Mr. Franklin stirred the
company up into making a pleasant evening of it?

Nothing of the sort! He had quite recovered himself, and he was in
wonderful force and spirits, Penelope having informed him, I suspect, of
Mr. Godfrey's reception in the rose-garden. But, talk as he might,
nine times out of ten he pitched on the wrong subject, or he addressed
himself to the wrong person; the end of it being that he offended some,
and puzzled all of them. That foreign training of his--those French and
German and Italian sides of him, to which I have already alluded--came
out, at my lady's hospitable board, in a most bewildering manner.

What do you think, for instance, of his discussing the lengths to which
a married woman might let her admiration go for a man who was not her
husband, and putting it in his clear-headed witty French way to the
maiden aunt of the Vicar of Frizinghall? What do you think, when he
shifted to the German side, of his telling the lord of the manor,
while that great authority on cattle was quoting his experience in the
breeding of bulls, that experience, properly understood counted for
nothing, and that the proper way to breed bulls was to look deep into
your own mind, evolve out of it the idea of a perfect bull, and produce
him? What do you say, when our county member, growing hot, at cheese
and salad time, about the spread of democracy in England, burst out as
follows: "If we once lose our ancient safeguards, Mr. Blake, I beg
to ask you, what have we got left?"--what do you say to Mr. Franklin
answering, from the Italian point of view: "We have got three things
left, sir--Love, Music, and Salad"? He not only terrified the company
with such outbreaks as these, but, when the English side of him turned
up in due course, he lost his foreign smoothness; and, getting on
the subject of the medical profession, said such downright things in
ridicule of doctors, that he actually put good-humoured little Mr. Candy
in a rage.

The dispute between them began in Mr. Franklin being led--I forget
how--to acknowledge that he had latterly slept very badly at night. Mr.
Candy thereupon told him that his nerves were all out of order and that
he ought to go through a course of medicine immediately. Mr. Franklin
replied that a course of medicine, and a course of groping in the dark,