lodges still endure unbroken.

I have the privilege of slightly knowing him. Heavily and somewhat
clumsily built, of a vast, disjointed, rambling frame, he can still pull
himself together, and figure, not without admiration, in the saloon or
the ball-room. His hue and temperament are plentifully bilious; he has a
saturnine eye; his cheek is of a dark blue where he has been shaven.
Essentially he is to be numbered among the man-haters, a convinced
contemner of his fellows. Yet he is himself of a commonplace ambition
and greedy of applause. In talk, he is remarkable for a thirst of
information, loving rather to hear than to communicate; for sound and
studious views; and, judging by the extreme short-sightedness of common
politicians, for a remarkable provision of events. All this, however,
without grace, pleasantry, or charm, heavily set forth, with a dull
countenance. In our numerous conversations, although he has always heard
me with deference, I have been conscious throughout of a sort of
ponderous finessing hard to tolerate. He produces none of the effect of
a gentleman; devoid not merely of pleasantry, but of all attention or
communicative warmth of bearing. No gentleman, besides, would so parade
his amours with the Princess; still less repay the Prince for his
long-suffering with a studied insolence of demeanour and the fabrication
of insulting nicknames, such as Prince Featherhead, which run from ear to
ear and create a laugh throughout the country. Gondremark has thus some
of the clumsier characters of the self-made man, combined with an
inordinate, almost a besotted, pride of intellect and birth. Heavy,
bilious, selfish, inornate, he sits upon this court and country like an
incubus.

But it is probable that he preserves softer gifts for necessary purposes.
Indeed, it is certain, although he vouchsafed none of it to me, that this
cold and stolid politician possesses to a great degree the art of
ingratiation, and can be all things to all men. Hence there has probably
sprung up the idle legend that in private life he is a gross romping
voluptuary. Nothing, at least, can well be more surprising than the
terms of his connection with the Princess. Older than her husband,
certainly uglier, and, according to the feeble ideas common among women,
in every particular less pleasing, he has not only seized the complete
command of all her thought and action, but has imposed on her in public a
humiliating part.