From the somewhat cold and reserved manner of his parting, Lord Glenmore, when alone, began to think he had committed a mistake in treating his friend's engagement with Lady Adeline lightly, and condemned himself for what had escaped him on the subject. For Lord Glenmore was a man of honourable, as well as kindly feelings; and in giving the counsel of a _prudential_ marriage to Lord Albert, was at the same time the last person to think that, in an union for life, happiness ought to be sacrificed to interested views: the furthest also from his thoughts would have been any design to interfere between, or to disunite any two persons who were attached to each other. Perhaps the world in general might not have given him credit for this amiability of feeling, or for the strict principle which he really possessed, from seeing that he lived in constant intercourse with a class, where, if similar worth of character did exist at all, it certainly never was looked up to as a merit in the possessor. It must be allowed that Lord Glenmore was any thing rather than a fitting member of such a class; for in addition to warmth of heart, natural affection, and good principles, he possessed talents of a very superior kind, and held opinions quite at variance with the received creed of his companions. He believed, for instance, that life was given for other purposes than to be spent in accident alone, or that a perpetual course of frivolous pursuits, without any higher aim or object, should be suffered to govern human existence; but that, on the contrary, every action should tend to some useful purpose. If Lord Glenmore was ambitious (and he was so), his ambition was of a noble kind; and while he sought power, his uprightness of character could never suffer him to abuse its exercise. He was called proud by some: but although impressed with a sense of the dignity of the aristocracy to which he belonged, it was not a blind and foolish estimate of rank which made him value it, but a conviction of the importance and responsibility which every one placed in the higher grades of society possesses, while fulfilling the duties of the sphere in which Providence places him; and if in society he sometimes appeared reserved, and joined not in all the empty, uninteresting topics that make up the conversation of most of the coteries of _ton_, it was--that his mind was filled, even in the buzz of the vapid talk around him, with matters worthy of the reflection and study of an intellectual being.