Remember me affectionately, if you please, to dear Mr. Oliphant, and do not drive your little car from the door without telling Lawrence that I enquire for him. Farewell! Your own FREDERICK. LETTER XXVI. MR. OTWAY TO MRS. DOUGLAS. Dearest Friend, My former letters have been faithful transcripts from the book of our lives, and Frederick has filled up all interstices, but before I proceed to the main purpose which induces me to write to-day, I must indulge myself, and not _displease you_, by saying a few words of this dear youth, whom I have hitherto only mentioned incidentally, because I wished to see how he would bear the whirl of a London scene, and comport himself in some situations as trying as they were novel to him, ere I trumpeted his praise. You know how I abhor flattery, and will therefore give me credit for believing what I express of admiration for your son, who really astonishes me. Though introduced for the first time to what is called, certainly not _par excellence_, the Great World, he is neither awkward nor confused. The easy polish of _true_ refinement which he learned at home, in the bosom of that loved retreat where all the best affections of his noble and manly heart are centered, _frank_ him into a metropolitan drawing-room, as fearlessly as into your's at Glenalta; and his manners exhibit the happiest combination of boldness, in which there is no mixture of presumption, and modesty without _mauvaise honte_. With all the freshness of curiosity, and the candour of one who disdains subterfuge, he flies about collecting information--gratifying his good taste, and honestly confessing his previous ignorance of a thousand objects which have ceased to stimulate, if they ever did so, the vapid group by which we are environed. The courage with which Frederick dares to express his own thoughts, instead of borrowing the hacknied reverberation of opinions often adopted without discrimination, and rendered current by an idle multitude, who, contented to follow a fashionable leader, never exert a faculty for themselves, has something in it that _commands_ attention, and I continually hear the inquiry of "who is he?" succeed the avowal of some sentiment on his part at variance with the modish creed.