All the poor people described in this work were pious and moral, and all the rich people were infidel and profligate; but for the noblemen--and there were a good many persons of high rank in the various stories--were reserved all the choicest invectives and most superlative abuse. Nothing, of course, can be more unfair than this treatment of a class of persons who, considering their temptations, are really more than respectable. As a general rule, the portraits were extravagantly malicious, but they had this attraction for me--they were all exceedingly like Sir Massingberd Heath. He was the very type of that bloated aristocracy that is held up in scarecrow fashion, by republican writers. There were not many living specimens to be met with even at the date of my tale, and the old baronet, perhaps himself perceiving that he was one of the last of them, determined that he should not be the least in infamy. Like the Unjust Judge, he neither feared God nor regarded man, and, worse than he, he would not perform a good action on account of the importunity of any person. She must have been a brave woman who importuned Sir Massingberd Heath, and could scarcely have been brought up in Fairburn. Whether George IV. was king or not, at the period of which I write, it matters not, for his connection with our squire had terminated years before; but at one time they had been fast, very fast friends. When a king and a baronet run a race of extravagance, the king generally wins, and so it had been in this case; His Majesty, or rather His Royal Highness the Regent, had <i>distanced</i> Sir Massingberd, and they were not now upon even speaking terms. Friendships of this sort do not last when one of the parties has spent all his money. What was the use of a poor man at White's who could only look on while his old friends played whist for one hundred pound points, and five hundred pounds upon the rubber? What business--let alone pleasure--could one have in London, when Howard and Gribbs would not lend one fifty pounds even at fifty per cent.? Sir Massingberd had left that gay, wicked world for good, that is to say, for ever, and was obliged to live at his beautiful country-seat in spite of himself. He was irretrievably ruined, so far as his court prospects were concerned, for he had no ready money. He owned all Fairburn, and many hundreds of rich acres about it, beside the Park and the river; he had the great tithes of the place, and manorial rights (which he exercised, too) innumerable. Nobody quite knew--he did not know himself--what privileges he had or had not, what pathways he could close at pleasure, what heriots he could demand, or what precise property he had in Fairburn gravel-pits; but in all cases he gave himself the benefit of the doubt. It was a very foolish thing to leave any disputed point to the sense of justice, or the good feeling of our squire, and yet this was generally done. Where it was not done, where