“That old gentleman,” he began, pointing to a magnificent fellow in rich chain armour, whose effigies occupied one end of the gallery, “that old gentleman is the founder of the family. Blessings on his beard! I almost fancy it has grown longer since I saw it last. He fought inordinately at Harfleur and Agincourt, was eminently admired and bruised, won a whole grove of laurels, and lost three fingers and a thumb. See, over his head is the crest which was his guerdon; a little finger rampant, and the motto blazoned gorgeously round, ‘_Mon doyt est mon droit!_’” “A splendid servant of the sword,” said Davenant; “what a glorious scope of forehead, and what a lowering decision in the upper lip. A real soldier! He would have cleft down a dozen of your modern male _figurantes_!” “Perhaps so,” replied Villars; “but you see he made a bad hand of it, notwithstanding. His nephew, there, is something more soberly habited, but he was not a jot less mad. Who would dream of such a frenzy in sackcloth and sad countenance? He was a follower of Wyckliffe before it was the fashion, and----” “An excellent piece of workmanship too! I like to see some fury in a man’s faith. Who can endure a minister of the gospel mounting his pulpit at Marylebone, with his well-ordered bands, and his clean manuscript, and his matter-of-fact disquisition, and his matter-of-course tone! That bald apostle has lips I could have listened to: he might have been an enthusiast, or a bigot, or a madman, or e’en what you will; but he has a show of zeal, and an assumption of authority; there is fire about the old man!” “There was once,” said Marmaduke, “for he was burned in Smithfield. Come hither, here is a young fellow you will admire--Everard the Beautiful (by the way, they say he is like me), who fell in love with the pretty Baroness de Pomeroy. He used to sing under her balcony at midnight, out of pure gallantry, and out of all tune: catching sighs from the high window, and colds from the high wind. He was full three years wailing and whispering, and dreaming and dying, and smarting in the left breast, and sonneting in the left turret. At last came the fifth act of the drama, death and happiness blended together with strict poetic propriety; the fates threw him into her arms one night, and the baron threw him into the moat one morning.” “I loathe and detest that eternal sneer of yours. You believe and feel, Marmaduke, although you are too weak to confess it, that the life you have described, a turbid unresting sea of passion and anxiety, and hope and fear, and brief calm and long madness, is worth--oh! twenty times over--the sleepy river of a pedant’s philosophy, or the dirty ditch-water of your own clumsy indifference.”