eas Finn had lost his father as well as his wife, and had
inherited about four thousand pounds. He was not at this time much
over thirty; and it must be acknowledged in regard to him that, since
the day on which he had accepted place and retired from London, his
very soul had sighed for the lost glories of Westminster and Downing
Street.

There are certain modes of life which, if once adopted, make
contentment in any other circumstances almost an impossibility. In
old age a man may retire without repining, though it is often beyond
the power even of the old man to do so; but in youth, with all the
faculties still perfect, with the body still strong, with the hopes
still buoyant, such a change as that which had been made by Phineas
Finn was more than he, or than most men, could bear with equanimity.
He had revelled in the gas-light, and could not lie quiet on a sunny
bank. To the palate accustomed to high cookery, bread and milk is
almost painfully insipid. When Phineas Finn found himself discharging
in Dublin the routine duties of his office,--as to which there was
no public comment, no feeling that such duties were done in the face
of the country,--he became sick at heart and discontented. Like
the warhorse out at grass he remembered the sound of the battle
and the noise of trumpets. After five years spent in the heat and
full excitement of London society, life in Ireland was tame to
him, and cold, and dull. He did not analyse the difference between
metropolitan and quasi-metropolitan manners; but he found that men
and women in Dublin were different from those to whom he had been
accustomed in London. He had lived among lords, and the sons and
daughters of lords; and though the official secretaries and assistant
commissioners among whom his lot now threw him were for the most part
clever fellows, fond of society, and perhaps more than his equals in
the kind of conversation which he found to be prevalent, still they
were not the same as the men he had left behind him,--men alive with
the excitement of parliamentary life in London. When in London he had
often told himself that he was sick of it, and that he would better
love some country quiet life. Now Dublin was his Tibur, and the
fickle one found that he could not be happy unless he were back again
at Rome. When, therefore, he received the following letter from
his friend, Barrington Erle, he neighed like the old warhorse, and
already found himself shouting "Ha, ha,"