game of whist; the routine of petty business in the House of Lords; and the etiquette of the court. One branch of useful knowledge by the way he had, however, completely mastered--that which is so ably condensed in _Debrett_; and he became a sort of oracle in such matters. As for his politics, he professed Whig principles--and was, indeed, a bitter though quiet partisan. In attendance to his senatorial duties, he practised an exemplary punctuality; was always to be found in the House at its sitting and rising; and never once, on any occasion, great or small, voted against his party. He had never been heard to speak in a full House; first, because he never could summon nerve enough for the purpose; secondly, because he never had anything to say; and lastly, lest he should compromise his dignity, and destroy the _prestige_ of his position, by not speaking better than any one present. His services were not, however, entirely overlooked; for, on his party coming into office for a few weeks, (they knew it could be for no longer a time,) they made him Lord Steward of the Household; which was thenceforward an epoch to which he referred every event of his life, great and small. The great object of his ambition, ever since he had been of an age to form large and comprehensive views of action and conduct, to conceive superior designs, and to achieve distinction among mankind--was, to obtain a step in the peerage; for considering the antiquity of his family, and his ample, nay, _superfluous_ pecuniary means--so much more than adequate to support his present double dignity of earl and baron--he thought it but a reasonable return for his eminent political services, to confer upon him the honor which he coveted. But his anxiety on this point had been recently increased a thousand-fold by one circumstance. A gentleman who held an honorable and lucrative official situation in the House of Lords, and who never had treated the Earl of Dreddlington with that profound obsequiousness which the earl conceived to be his due--but, on the contrary, had presumed to consider himself a man, and an Englishman, equally with the earl--had, a short time before, succeeded in establishing his title to an earldom which had long been dormant, and was, alas, of creation earlier than that of Dreddlington. The Earl of Dreddlington took this untoward circumstance so much to heart, that for some months afterwards he appeared to be in a decline; always experiencing a dreadful inward spasm whenever the Earl of Fitzwalter made his appearance in the House. For this sad state of things there was plainly but one remedy--a MARQUISATE--at which the earl gazed with the wistful eye of an old and feeble ape at a cocoa-nut, just above his reach, and which he beholds at length grasped and carried off by some nimbler and younger rival.