Amongst the many oddities (for I am loth to call them absurdities) that marked the character of Robert de Lancaster, his pride of pedigree was one of the most prominent and most open to ridicule. That his friend Colonel Wilson saw it in this light there is no doubt; yet although he was quite intolerant enough towards many of Robert’s eccentricities upon speculative points, in this favourite folly he left him undisturbed, perceiving, as we may suppose, that it was a prejudice not to be attacked but at the risque of his friendship. This topic therefore had never come into discussion, and even the history of the picture, lately brought out of obscurity, was, as we have before observed, new to the incurious colonel. He had seen the pedigree unrolled for the first time, but of its contents he knew no more than what his single question about King Samothes had drawn from De Lancaster in the way of explanation. If Wilson acquiesced in this foible of his friend, none else amongst the numbers, that were in habits of acquaintance with the family, were likely to start any question as to the antiquity of it; they were so cordially welcomed, and so hospitably entertained at Kray Castle, that it would have been hard indeed upon their host, if they could have swallowed nothing at his table but the dinner, that he put upon it. Add to this, that the good old man was a patient listener to other people’s anecdotes, though a deliberate narrator of his own. For all those dealers in the marvellous, who are proverbially said to shoot a long bow, he had a great deal of companionable fellow-feeling, and as he did not hold the commonly received opinions of the world in very high respect, he had boldly put together and amassed a curious and elaborate collection, somewhat after the manner of Coryat, of what he styled his _Confutations of vulgar Errors_. These have come under the inspection of some people since his death, and though it must be owned that they are not to be read without some few grains of allowance, yet there is a sufficiency of novelty to make them entertaining, and good sense enough interspersed to render them in a certain degree respectable.