RANK AND TALENT. VOL. III. PRINTED BY A. J. VALPY, RED LION COURT, FLEET STREET. RANK AND TALENT; A NOVEL. BY THE AUTHOR OF “TRUCKLEBOROUGH-HALL.” When once he’s made a Lord, Who’ll be so saucy as to think he can Be impotent in wisdom? COOK. Why, Sir, ’tis neither satire nor moral, but the mere passage of an history; yet there are a sort of discontented creatures, that bear a stingless envy to great ones, and these will wrest the doings of any man to their base malicious appliment. MARSTON. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. III. LONDON: HENRY COLBURN, NEW BURLINGTON STREET. 1829. RANK AND TALENT. CHAPTER I. “----th’ high vulgar of the town, Which England’s common courtesy, To make bad fellowship go down, Politely calls good company.” COOPER. We left Dr. Crack at the end of the last volume in a fair way of falling deeply in love with Miss Henderson, and there, for the present, we will leave him still, conscious that no one envies him. Our attention is now required in another quarter. The gentle, unobtrusive Clara Rivolta, whom nature indeed had never destined to be a heroine or even to be talked about, continued to undergo with much forbearance and quietness the persecuting attentions of the fragrant Henry Augustus Tippetson, who divided his time and attentions between the Countess of Trimmerstone and the grand-daughter of old John Martindale. What points of resemblance there were between these two ladies is not easy to say. Tippetson, however, thought much of rank: it was so great an honor to be intimate with a countess. Every body said that Tippetson was too intimate with the Countess, and another every body said that he was going to be married to Clara Rivolta.