and, with Lord Atherley himself for her charioteer; and, as a finish to her doctrine of chances, she had Constance set in her place towards the termination of the drive, having chanced to forget an appointment with the redoubtable Lady Heavy side, which appointment had had no previous existence.

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To one and all of these chance manoeuvres Lord Atherley had fallen a prey, and the result was, he became their appointed esquire to the forthcoming Almacks. The fact was, he admired Constance Graham. Indeed, he was in indolent love with her, and he followed for her sake in the wake of her mother. over, though there were richer heiresses than Constance Graham, there were few who possessed a long descended family estate. One other motive for Lord Atherley's attachment remained; he thought he had rivals, and it was his desire that he and he alone should carry off the prize. Lady Margaret, too, ever appeared

to him a good-natured, obliging, simple minded, woman, and Sir Alexander a man of good honest principles, only a little too generous, at least such were his lordship's impressions of the parties. He now became a frequent visitor in Grosvenor-square, where he dined almost daily. Constance was annoyed at seeing so much of him, and provoked to find herself the object of his attention.

But to the Earl of Atherley, who, according to Boyle, was described as "Earl of Atherley, Grosvenor-square; Compton Audley, Warwickshire; Wingfield Manor House, Hampshire :' he was a nobleman of very large property and of very limited understanding. He had also the good fortune to be a bachelor of forty; having let that amount of time slip through his fingers, neither he, nor any one about him could very well tell how. He was, according to the account his friends gave of him, "the most good-natured easy man in the world."

He wished to marry Constance Graham, as has been intimated, partly for love, or what he called love, and partly from interest, being de sirous of becoming the possessor of the old baronial territory, Graham Castle. He had been a comely youth in his seventeenth year, and had, as the military phrase is, carried his colours through; that is, he retained an undethroned rosy countenance, under grey hair tending to white: of course there was the usual romantic story, that for love unrequited his hair had undergone a Protean change in one night. Alas! the only grief that had ever befallen Lord Atherley, was the loss of a horse or dinner, and the failure of a plan, entirely of his own invention, for propelling balloons by the not very aërial means of a steamengine.

He was one of those bizarres mentioned by Madame de Stael," à l'égard des femmes, qu'il leur pardonne plutôt de manquer à leurs devoirs,

que d'attirer l'attention par des talens distingués." He studied only, to use a phrase of Dr. Johnson's, "one of the arts that aggrandise life;" viz. Cookery. His precept was "In solo vivendi causa palato est;" his practice, to devote his best energies to his masticatorial duties. This oracle of culinary love piqued himself in fact upon being a bon vivant; a gourmet of taste and sentiment, he possessed "une erudition gastronomique tout a fait effrayante." "Nothing like good eating and drinking to bring out the humanities.”

"La table est mon seul amour;

Manger, chanter, rire et boire,

Voilà mon ordre du jour—”

were his constant themes, and he acted upon the maxim they implied.

The way to his heart, to use a vulgar truism, was through his mouth. He was a ventripotent Apicius, a real epicure; one who boasted that he never wasted his appetite on a joint. His

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life was a confused mêlée, being as it were unfixed and without a motive, save in his meals, and there he was rigidly and inflexibly punctual. "The tocsin of the soul, the dinner bell," would at all times rouse him to action. We have now only to sum up this brief account of Lord Atherley by saying, that among the loves of the great-as Alexander loved his horse Bucephalus; Numa a lap-dog; Augustus a parrot; Caligula a horse; Virgil a butterfly; Nero a starling; Commodus an ape; Heliogabalus a sparrow; Honorius a chicken; Baron Trenck a spider-so did Lord Atherley love gastronomy; 'he discoursed of the science de gueule with as much gravity as if he was speaking of theology; he reversed the saying of Moliere's miser, "Il faut manger pour vivre et non pas vivre pour manger;" and with some slight variation realised the line which the Roman epigrammatist has so pithily described