r's child; but, as their phrase would have run,
had they dared to give it utterance to one another, a child of sin. How
foreign to them, in that character, how strange, when she was looked on
as an inhabitant of their house, they hardly dared to estimate; until
the timorous estimation, from gradually swelling, suddenly sank; nature
invaded them; they could discard the alienating sense of the taint; and
not only did they no longer fear the moment when Mr. Stuart Rem or Mr.
Posterley might call for evening tea, but they consulted upon inviting
the married one of those gentlemen, to 'divert dear Nesta.' Every night
she slept well. In all she did, she proved she was 'of the blood.' She
had Victor's animated eyes; she might have, they dreaded to think,
his eloquence. They put it down to his eloquence entirely, that their
resistance to his petition had been overcome, for similarly with the
treatment of the private acts of royal personages by lacquey History,
there is, in the minds of the ultra-civilized, an insistance, that
any event having a consequence in matters personal to them, be at all
hazards recorded with the utmost nicety in decency. By such means, they
preserve the ceremonial self-respect, which is a necessity of their
existence; and so they maintain the regal elevation over the awe-struck
subjects of their interiors; who might otherwise revolt, pull down,
scatter, dishonour, expose for a shallow fiction the holiest, the most
vital to them. A democratic evil spirit is abroad, generated among
congregations, often perilously communicating its wanton laughter to the
desperate wickedness they know (not solely through the monition of Mr.
Stuart Rem) to lurk within. It has to be excluded: on certain points
they must not think. The night of Tasso was darkly clouded in the minds
of the pure ladies: a rift would have seized their half-slumbering sense
of smell, to revive the night, perhaps disorder the stately march of
their intelligences.

Victor's eloquence, Victor's influence, Victor's child he carried them
as a floodstream, insomuch, that their reception of this young creature
of the blot on her birth, was regarded by them in the unmentioned
abstract, and the child's presence upon earth seen with the indulgence
(without the naughty curiosity) of the loyal moral English for the
numerous offspring of the peccadillos of their monarchs. These things
pass muster from being 'Britannically cocooned in the purple,' says our
irr