MR. BRAMBLE had never been quite able to resign himself to a definitely impersonal attitude toward Lord Eric Temple. He seemed to cling, despite himself, to a privilege long since outlawed by time and circumstance and the inevitable outgrowing of knickerbockers by the aforesaid Lord Eric. Back in the good old days it had been his pleasant,--and sometimes unpleasant,--duty to direct a very small Eric in matters not merely educational but of deportment as well. In short, Eric, at the age of five, fell into the capable, kindly and more or less resolute hands of a well-recommended tutor, and that tutor was no other than J. Bramble. At the age of twelve, the boy went off to school in a little high hat and an Eton suit, and J. Bramble was at once, you might say, out of the frying pan into the fire. In other words, he was promoted by his lordship, the boy's grandfather, to the honourable though somewhat onerous positions of secretary, librarian and cataloguer, all in one. He had been able to teach Eric a great many things he didn't know, but there was nothing he could impart to his lordship. That irascible old gentleman knew everything. After thrice informing his lordship that Sir Walter Scott was the author of _Guy Mannering_, and being thrice informed that he was nothing of the sort, the desolate Mr. Bramble realized that he was no longer a tutor,--and that he ought to be rather thankful for it. It exasperated him considerably, however, to have the authorship of _Guy Mannering_ arbitrarily ascribed to three different writers, on three separate occasions, when any schoolboy could have told the old gentleman that Fielding and Sterne and Addison had no more to do with the book than William Shakespeare himself. His lordship maintained that no one could tell _him_ anything about Scott; he had him on his shelves and he had read him from A to Izzard. And he was rather severe with Mr. Bramble for accepting a position as librarian when he didn't know any more than that about books. And from this you may be able to derive some sort of an opinion concerning the cantankerous, bull-headed old party (Bramble's appellation behind the hand) who ruled Fenlew Hall, the place where Tom Trotter was reared and afterwards disowned.