rds, applied them to Marie
de Martigny, and her son Francis Tyrrel. Never did Earl that ever
wore coronet fly into a pitch of more uncontrollable rage, than did
my right honourable father: and in the ardour of his reply, he
adopted my mother's phraseology, to inform her, that if there _was_
a whore and bastard connected with his house, it was herself and her
brat.

"I was even then a sharp little fellow, and was incredibly struck
with the communication, which, in this hour of ungovernable
irritation, had escaped my right honourable father. It is true, he
instantly gathered himself up again; and, he perhaps recollecting
such a word as _bigamy_, and my mother, on her side, considering the
consequences of such a thing as a descent from the Countess of
Etherington into Mrs. Bulmer, neither wife, maid, nor widow, there
was an apparent reconciliation between them, which lasted for some
time. But the speech remained deeply imprinted on my remembrance;
the more so, that once, when I was exerting over my friend Francis
Tyrrel, the authority of a legitimate brother, and Lord Oakendale,
old Cecil, my father's confidential valet, was so much scandalized,
as to intimate a possibility that we might one day change
conditions. These two accidental communications seemed to me a key
to certain long lectures, with which my father used to regale us
boys, but me in particular, upon the extreme mutability of human
affairs,--the disappointment of the best-grounded hopes and
expectations,--and the necessity of being so accomplished in all
useful branches of knowledge, as might, in case of accidents, supply
any defalcation in our rank and fortune;--as if any art or science
could make amends for the loss of an Earldom, and twelve thousand
a-year! All this prosing seemed to my anxious mind designed to
prepare me for some unfortunate change; and when I was old enough to
make such private enquiries as lay in my power, I became still more
persuaded that my right honourable father nourished some thoughts of
making an honest woman of Marie de Martigny, and a legitimate elder
brother of Francis, after his death at least, if not during his
life. I was the more convinced of this, when a little affair, which
I chanced to have with the daughter of my Tu----, drew down my
father's wrath upon me in great abundance, a