s of character, which were callousness to
whatever was affectionate and insensibility to whatever was moral.
Though less learned than Maltravers, he was on the whole a very
instructed man. He mastered the surfaces of many sciences, became
satisfied of their general principles, and threw the study aside never
to be forgotten (for his memory was like a vice), but never to be
prosecuted any further. To this he added a general acquaintance with
whatever is most generally acknowledged as standard in ancient or modern
literature. What is admired only by a few, Lumley never took the trouble
to read. Living amongst trifles, he made them interesting and novel
by his mode of viewing and treating them. And here indeed was _a_
talent--it was the talent of social life--the talent of enjoyment to the
utmost with the least degree of trouble to himself. Lumley Ferrers was
thus exactly one of those men whom everybody calls exceedingly clever,
and yet it would puzzle one to say in what he was so clever. It was,
indeed, that nameless power which belongs to ability, and which makes
one man superior, on the whole, to another, though in many details by
no means remarkable. I think it is Goethe who says somewhere that, in
reading the life of the greatest genius, we always find that he was
acquainted with some men superior to himself, who yet never attained to
general distinction. To the class of these mystical superior men Lumley
Ferrers might have belonged; for though an ordinary journalist would
have beaten him in the arts of composition, few men of genius, however
eminent, could have felt themselves above Ferrers in the ready grasp and
plastic vigour of natural intellect. It only remains to be said of this
singular young man, whose character as yet was but half developed, that
he had seen a great deal of the world, and could live at ease and in
content with all tempers and ranks; fox-hunters or scholars, lawyers or
poets, patricians or _parvenus_, it was all one to Lumley Ferrers.

Ernest was, as usual, in his own room, when he heard, along the corridor
without, all that indefinable bustling noise which announces an arrival.
Next came a most ringing laugh, and then a sharp, clear, vigorous voice,
that ran through his ears like a dagger. Ernest was immediately aroused
to all the majesty of indignant sullenness. He walked out on the terrace
of the portico, to avoid the repetition of the disturbance: and once
more settled back into his broken