no settlements were ever brought into it; and
thus entails were cut off to admit some new mortgage, till the rent-roll
was somewhat less than L300 a year when Mr. Darrell's father came into
possession. Yet somehow or other he got to college, where no Darrell had
been since the time of the Glorious Revolution, and was a learned man
and an antiquary,--A GREAT ANTIQUARY! You may have read his works.
I know there is one copy of them in the British Museum, and there is
another here, but that copy Mr. Darrell keeps under lock and key."

"I am ashamed to say I don't even know the titles of those works."

"There were 'Popular Ballads on the Wars of the Roses;' 'Darrelliana,'
consisting of traditional and other memorials of the Darrell family;
'Inquiry into the Origin of Legends Connected with Dragons;' 'Hours
amongst Monumental Brasses,' and other ingenious lucubrations above the
taste of the vulgar; some of them were even read at the Royal Society
of Antiquaries. They cost much to print and publish. But I have heard
my father, who was his bailiff, say that he was a pleasant man, and was
fond of reciting old scraps of poetry, which he did with great energy;
indeed, Mr. Darrell declares that it was the noticing, in his father's
animated and felicitous elocution, the effects that voice, look, and
delivery can give to words, which made Mr. Darrell himself the fine
speaker he is. But I can only recollect the antiquary as a very majestic
gentleman, with a long pigtail--awful, rather, not so much so as his
son, but still awful--and so sad-looking; you would not have recovered
your spirits for a week if you had seen him, especially when the old
house wanted repairs, and he was thinking how he could pay for them!"

"Was Mr. Darrell, the present one, an only child?"

"Yes, and much with his father, whom he loved most dearly, and to this
day he sighs if he has to mention his father's name! He has old Mr.
Darrell's portrait over the chimney-piece in his own reading-room;
and he had it in his own library in Carlton Gardens. Our Mr. Darrell's
mother was very pretty, even as I remember her: she died when he was
about ten years old. And she too was a relation of yours,--a Haughton
by blood,--but perhaps you will be ashamed of her, when I say she was
a governess in a rich mercantile family. She had been left an orphan. I
believe old Mr. Darrell (not that he was old then) married her because
the Haughtons could or would do nothing for her, a