Bright gleams vanish--the stately dinner parties grow dim, Masters of Horses and Hounds go to battle, the plate is melted down, and all is sad and sere. The young lord is sent by King Charles abroad, and Parliamentary Fairfax comes thundering at the gate, where admittance is refused by the venerable old marquis. Fairfax besieges boldly and is gallantly attacked by repeated sallies. I had rather the Puritans, with whom all my head goes, and with it half my heart, had behaved better than they did on this occasion. For after the venerable old marquis had fought nobly and surrendered on honorable terms, I am sorry to say he was most dishonorably treated, the conditions of capitulation being disgracefully violated, and the old marquis put in close prison, where he soon died in his eighty-fifth year.--Well, well--there was abundance of such false faith and dark villany on both sides ere the war was over. Be it remembered that these same nobles had kept the honor too closely to themselves, and ridiculed it out of life quite too sharply in the 'base mechanicals' to fairly expect mastery in gentility from them. And in these same Partingtonian Biographies, I am often inclined to suspect that the lions do some of their own carving. Puritans sequestered and smashed the estate right and left--lead sold for six thousand pounds, woods cut down and sold for one hundred thousand more. 'Pity!' do you say? Reader mine, there is enough land in parks at this present day in broad England to feed that wretched one eighth of her population who are now buried at public expense. That dis-parking business was at any rate not badly done. Little more is seen of the young lord through the war. In 1654 he is at King Charles's court in France--is sent to London to procure supplies of money for the king--is caught and Towered, where he rests for several years, sorrowfully poor, if we may judge from a letter to Colonel Copley, in which he declares that 'I am forced to begge, if you could possible, eyther to helpe me with tenne pownds to this bearer, or to make vse of the coache and to goe to Mr. Clerke, and if he could this daye helpe me to fifty pownds then to paye yourself the five pownds I owe you out of them.' A melancholy letter, after all that glittering Arthur's-court splendor of first, second, and third tables of nobility, Masters of Robes and Records--a letter in which there seems some trace of getting money by 'projects' and 'bubbles'--whether of doing little bills or by Notable Inventions, I will not say. Prison does not, it is true, last forever, but its doors open on a scene of baseness blacker than that which brought the brave old marquis with sorrow to his grave. The tale is told in a paragraph: