He was a cavalier to her heart,--grave, religious, cultivated,--a soldier from duty, but finding his delight in poetry and music, and all beautiful things made by God or by man. It was a great interest to me to sit at Lady Lucy's feet and listen to their discourse about music and painting,--about the great Flemish painter Rubens, who had painted the ceiling of the king's banqueting-house at Whitehall, the grand building which Mr. Inigo Jones had just erected; and about the additions the king had lately made to his superb collection of pictures. He and Lady Lucy spoke of the purchase of the cartoons of Raffaelle and of other pictures by this great master, and by Titian, Correggio, and Giulio Romano, or by Cornelius Jansen and other Flemish painters, with as much triumph as if each picture had been a province won for the crown. He spoke also with the greatest enthusiasm of the painter Vandyke, who was painting the portraits of the Royal Family, and the great gentlemen and ladies of the Court. He had brought a portrait of himself by Vandyke as a present to his mother, (only, he said, as a bribe for her own by the same hand); and it seemed to me that Mr. Vandyke must be as fine a gentleman as Harry Davenant himself, or he never could have painted so perfectly and nobly the noble features, the grave almost sad look of the eyes, the long chestnut-coloured love-locks, the courtly air, and the dress so easy and yet so rich. All this was very new discourse to me; paintings, especially religious paintings such as the Holy Families and Crucifixions by the foreign masters which Harry Davenant described, never having been much encouraged among us. When he spoke of music and poetry I was more at home, and when he alluded with admiration to the Masque of Comus by Mr. John Milton, I felt myself flush as at the praise of a friend. For the names revered at Davenant Hall and at Netherby were usually altogether different. For instance, of Archbishop Laud and Mr. Wentworth (afterwards Lord Strafford), whom Lady Lucy and her son seemed to regard as the two pillars of church and state, I had only heard as the persecutors of Mr. Prynne, and the subvertors of the liberties of the nation. But indeed the nation itself seemed to be little in Harry Davenant's esteem, except as a Royal Estate with very troublesome tenants who had to be kept down; and liberty, which in our home was a kind of sacred word, fell from his lips as if it had been a mere pretext for every kind of disorder. With all his refinement, however, it did seem strange to me that Harry Davenant should enter with apparent zest into the bull-baiting, bear-baiting, and cock-fighting which were the festivities of the next week. But he said these were fine old English amusements, and it was right to show the people that the polish of the court did not make the courtiers dainty or womanish, or prevent their entering into these manly sports.