in question was a very young one, little more than a boy in fact (if a duke can ever be considered in the light of a boy). This youthful nobleman had a leading idea--though you would hardly have supposed it, to look at him--he believed that he was the best match in England; and so, in the conventional sense of the term, he undoubtedly was, although he would have been very dear at the price to any woman with a head and a heart. His pastors and masters, backed by the maternal anxieties of a duchess unambitious of the dignities of dowagership, had sedulously cultivated this one idea till it had assumed the character of a monomania, under the influence of which this unhappy scion of aristocracy looked upon life as a state of perpetual warfare against the whole race of women, and was haunted by a frightful vision of himself carried off and forcibly married to the chief of a horde of female pirates, with long tongues, longer nails, and an utter absence of creditable ancestry. His outward duke (if we may be allowed the expression) was decidedly prepossessing. He was tall and not ungraceful in figure, and had a bright, round, innocent face, as of a good child. His hair was nicely brushed and parted; whiskers he had none; indeed, the stinginess of nature to him in this particular was so remarkable, that, as the eldest Miss Simpkins afterwards observed to an eager audience of uninvited younger sisters, “So far from whiskers, my dears, now I come to think of it, his Grace had _rather the reverse!_” However, take him “for all in all,” he was a very creditable young duke, and a perfect godsend on the occasion in question. Then there was a descending scale from his Grace downwards, leading through the aristocracy of birth to the aristocracy of riches, till it reached the _élite_ of the country towns, and the more presentable specimens of yeomen farmers. But let us join a group of people that we know, and hear what they think of the guests who are so rapidly assembling.