On the other hand, it was singular to see how--the aristocracy of birth broken down--the aristocracy of letters had arisen. A Peerage, half composed of journalists, philosophers, and authors! This was the beau-ideal of Algernon Sidney's Aristocratic Republic, of the Helvetian vision of what ought to be the dispensation of public distinctions; yet was it, after all, a desirable aristocracy? Did society gain; did literature lose? Was the priesthood of Genius made more sacred and more pure by these worldly decorations and hollow titles; or was aristocracy itself thus rendered a more disinterested, a more powerful, or a more sagacious element in the administration of law, or the elevation of opinion? These questions, not lightly to be answered, could not fail to arouse the speculation and curiosity of a man who had been familiar with the closet and the forum; and in proportion as he found his interest excited in these problems to be solved by a foreign nation, did the thoughtful Englishman feel the old instinct--which binds the citizen to the fatherland--begin to stir once more earnestly and vividly within him. "You, yourself individually, are passing like us," said De Montaigne one day to Maltravers, "through a state of transition. You have forever left the Ideal, and you are carrying your cargo of experience over to the Practical. When you reach that haven, you will have completed the development of your forces." "You mistake me,--I am but a spectator." "Yes; but you desire to go behind the scenes; and he who once grows familiar with the green-room, longs to be an actor." With Madame de Ventadour and the De Montaignes Maltravers passed the chief part of his time. They knew how to appreciate his nobler and to love his gentler attributes and qualities; they united in a warm interest for his future fate; they combated his Philosophy of Inaction; and they felt that it was because he was not happy that he was not wise. Experience was to him what ignorance had been to Alice. His faculties were chilled and dormant. As affection to those who are unskilled in all things, so is affection to those who despair of all things. The mind of Maltravers was a world without a sun! CHAPTER III. COELEBS, quid agam?*--HORACE. * "What shall I do, a bachelor?" IN a room at Fenton's Hotel sat Lord Vargrave and Caroline Lady Doltimore,--two months after the marriage of the latter. "Doltimore has positively fixed, then, to go abroad on your return from Cornwall?" "Positively,--to Paris. You can join us at Christmas, I trust?" "I have no doubt of it; and before then I hope that I shall have arranged certain public matters, which at present harass and absorb me even more than my private affairs." "You have managed to obtain terms with Mr. Douce, and to delay the repayment of your debt to him?" "Yes, I hope so, till I touch Miss Cameron's income; which will be mine, I trust, by the time she is eighteen."