her novel _Ellen Middleton_, she had drawn "the line which is so
apt to be overstepped, and which Walter Scott never clearly saw,
between _naivete_ and vulgarity." Myself a devoted adherent of
Sir Walter, I can yet recall some would-be pleasantries of Julia
Mannering, of Isabella Wardour, and even of Die Vernon, which would
have caused a shudder in the "Sacred Circle." Happiest of all was
Freddy Leveson in his marriage with Lady Margaret Compton; but
their married life lasted only five years, and left behind it a
memory too tender to bear translation to the printed page.

Devonshire House was the centre of Freddy Leveson's social life--at
least until the death of his uncle, the sixth Duke, in 1858. That
unsightly but comfortable mansion was then in its days of glory, and
those who frequented it had no reason to regret the past. "Poodle
Byng," who carried down to 1871 the social conditions of the eighteenth
century, declared that nothing could be duller than Devonshire
House in his youth. "It was a great honour to go there, but I was
bored to death. The Duchess was usually stitching in one corner of
the room, and Charles Fox snoring in another." Under the splendid
but arbitrary rule of the sixth Duke no one stitched or snored.
Everyone who entered his saloons was well-born or beautiful or
clever or famous, and many of the guests combined all four
characteristics. When Prince Louis Napoleon, afterwards Napoleon
III., first came to live in London, his uncle Jerome asked the
Duke of Devonshire to invite his _mauvais sujet_ of a nephew to
Devonshire House, "so that he might for once be seen in decent
society"; and the Prince, repaid the Duke by trying to borrow five
thousand pounds to finance his descent on Boulogne. But the Duke,
though magnificent, was business-like, and the Prince was sent
empty away.

The society in which Freddy Leveson moved during his long career was
curiously varied. There was his own family in all its ramifications of
cousinship; and beyond its radius there was a circle of acquaintances
and associates which contained Charles Greville the diarist and
his more amiable brother Henry, Carlyle and Macaulay, Brougham
and Lyndhurst, J. A. Roebuck and Samuel Wilberforce, George Grote
and Henry Reeve, "that good-for-nothing fellow Count D'Orsay," and
Disraeli, "always courteous, but his courtesy sometimes overdone."

For womankind there were Lady Morley the wit and Lady Cowper the
humorist, and Lady Ash