The Right Honourable the Earl Verner was descended from that famous Verner who figured so magnificently in the early days of the reign of Henry IV. In the tournaments of that time, Henry, Earl Verner, was the bravest and most formidable of all the gallants of the period. He fought like a lion at the battle of Shrewsbury, and served the king in various parts of the country with unequalled bravery and success. The Verners had always been splendid men. There was another of the race who distinguished himself as highly in the senate as the Verner of Henry IV.’s time had in the field. It was to this senator that England owed so much in those critical times when the doctrines of the French Revolution were making progress in our own country. The Earl’s speech in parliament upon this grand question was one of the most powerful orations in history. He filled several high offices of state, and his fine administrative ability could be traced throughout the important epoch in which he lived. The present earl, though he had hitherto taken no lead in public affairs, was an accomplished scholar, and had contributed several important pamphlets to the literature of art and antiquity; and he would, no doubt, now take that position in the county to which his family distinction, his accomplishments, and his great wealth entitled him. The Countess of Verner had also sprung of a stock not by any means of small celebrity. Her parentage might be said to have represented the aristocracy of birth and commercial enterprise. Her father, the late Christopher Tallant, Esq., had ranked high amongst the merchant princes of Great Britain, and had come of an old Yorkshire family. Her mother, a lady of the noble house of Petherington, was a descendant of the Petheringtons of Fife. The Lord Petherington of that ilk it was who distinguished himself in Egypt in 1800, and who fell fighting the battles of his country in Spain. Celebrated for their beauty, the daughters of the house of Petherington would be familiar to those admirers of “female loveliness” who had studied “Garton’s Beauties of the Court.”