sovereign. I 'll be there; you may answer for me."

From the moment that Glencore had come to this resolve, a complete
change seemed to pass over the nature of the man. It was as though a
new spring had been given to his existence. The reformation that all the
blandishments of friendship, all the soft influences of kindness, could
never accomplish, was more than half effected by the mere thought of
an interview with a king, and the possible chance of a little royal
sympathy!

If Harcourt was astonished, he was not the less pleased at all this.
He encouraged Glencore's sense of gratification by every means in his
power, and gladly lent himself to all the petty anxieties about dress
and appearance in which he seemed now immersed. Nothing could exceed,
indeed, the care he bestowed on these small details; ever insisting as
he did that, his Majesty being the best-dressed gentleman in Europe,
these matters assumed a greater importance in his eyes.

"I must try to recover somewhat of my former self," said he. "There was
a time when I came and went freely to Carlton House, when I was somewhat
more than a mere frequenter of the Prince's society. They tell me that
of late he is glad to see any of those who partook of his intimacy of
those times; who can remember the genial spirits who made his table the
most brilliant circle of the world; who can talk to him of Hanger, and
Kelly, and Sheridan, and the rest of them. I spent my days and nights
with them."

Warming with the recollection of a period which, dissolute and
dissipated as it was, yet redeemed by its brilliancy many of its least
valuable features, Glencore poured forth story after story of a time
when statesmen had the sportive-ness of schoolboys, and the greatest
intellects loved to indulge in the wildest excesses of folly. A
good jest upon Eldon, a smart epigram on Sidmouth, a quiz against
Vansittart, was a fortune at Court; and there grew up thus around the
Prince a class who cultivated ridicule so assiduously that nothing was
too high or too venerable to escape their sarcasms.

Though Glencore was only emerging out of boyhood,--a young subaltern
in the Prince's own regiment,--when he first entered this society,
the impression it had made upon his mind was not the less permanent.
Independently of the charm of being thus admitted to the most choice
circle of the land, there was the fascination of intimacy with names
that even amongst contemporaries were illustriou