"Public opinion," he resumes, "is irresistible in England; and if it once turn against a man, were he Messiah himself, he could do nothing. It is not an intelligent public opinion: it confuses public and private qualifications. A man may be a great statesman and yet dislike his wife and like somebody else's. A man may be a great hero and yet may have an unseemly passion or an unpaid tailor. But the British public does not understand this. It invariably overlooks the man's greatness, and only sees the lady or the tailor who compromises him. It thinks--unhappily or happily, as you please to consider--that genius should keep the whole ten commandments. Now, genius is conspicuous for breaking them." Mr. Wootton here knocks a little ash off his cigar, and smiles like a man who has said something neatly. "It is the first time I ever heard you compliment genius," murmurs Lawrence Hamilton. "In Italy," pursues Mr. Wootton, "not very long ago a minister was accused of buying a piano out of the public funds for his mistress. Neither the piano nor the mistress hurt the gentleman in public estimation in that soft and accommodating clime. But that piano, though he might have paid for it with own money, would have ruined an English politician. Though it had been the very smallest cottage piano conceivable, it would have buried him forever under it if it had got talked about; he would never have explained it away, or made it even contingently endurable to the nation. You may, if you are a public man in England, commit every conceivable blunder, add millions to the national debt, eat your own words every evening in debate, and plunge the country into an abyss of unmeasured and unmeasurable revolution, and they will still have confidence in you if you read the lessons in church and walk home with your wife; but if it is ever rumored that you admire your neighbor's wife, down you go forever. And yet," continues Mr. Wootton, pensively, "people _do_ admire their neighbor's wife in England, and it seems a venial offence when one compares it with the desertion of Gordon, or the encouragement of a hydra-headed greed for the rich man's goods." With which Mr. Wootton yawns, rises, and also declares his intention to go to bed. The young duke follows him and walks by his side down the corridor. He is not at all like Disraeli's young duke: he is awkward, shy, and dull, he is neither amiable nor distinguished, but he has a painstaking wish in him to do well by his country, which is almost noble in a person who has been toadied, indulged, and tempted in all ways and on all sides ever since his cradle days. It is the disinterested patriotism which has been so largely the excellence and honor of the English nobility, and which is only possible in men of position so high that they are raised by it from birth above all vulgar covetousness or pecuniary needs.