ill bird, &c., and I will say no more about it. This shatterbrained
peer was, in other respects, a handsome accomplished man, with an
expression somewhat haughty, yet singularly pleasing when he chose
it--a man, in short, who might push his fortune with the fair sex.

"Lord Etherington, such as I have described him, being upon his
travels in France, formed an attachment of the heart--ay, and some
have pretended, of the hand also, with a certain beautiful orphan,
Marie de Martigny. Of this union is said to have sprung (for I am
determined not to be certain on that point) that most incommodious
person, Francis Tyrrel, as he calls himself, but as I would rather
call him, Francis Martigny; the latter suiting my views, as perhaps
the former name agrees better with his pretensions. Now, I am too
good a son to subscribe to the alleged regularity of the marriage
between my right honourable and very good lord father, because my
said right honourable and very good lord did, on his return to
England, become wedded, in the face of the church, to my very
affectionate and well-endowed mother, Ann Bulmer of Bulmer-hall,
from which happy union sprung I, Francis Valentine Bulmer Tyrrel,
lawful inheritor of my father and mother's joint estates, as I was
the proud possessor of their ancient names. But the noble and
wealthy pair, though blessed with such a pledge of love as myself,
lived mighty ill together, and the rather, when my right honourable
father, sending for this other Sosia, this unlucky Francis Tyrrel,
senior, from France, insisted, in the face of propriety, that he
should reside in his house, and share, in all respects, in the
opportunities of education by which the real Sosia, Francis
Valentine Bulmer Tyrrel, then commonly called Lord Oakendale, hath
profited in such an uncommon degree.

"Various were the matrimonial quarrels which arose between the
honoured lord and lady, in consequence of this unseemly conjunction
of the legitimate and illegitimate; and to these, we, the subjects
of the dispute, were sometimes very properly, as well as decorously,
made the witnesses. On one occasion, my right honourable mother, who
was a free-spoken lady, found the language of her own rank quite
inadequate to express the strength of her generous feelings, and
borrowing from the vulgar two emphatic wo