not therefore the less vehement. Many were the signs and tokens of that
dead-and-gone political faith which these loyal Arbuthnots left behind
them. In the bed-rooms there hung prints of King James the Second at the
Battle of the Boyne; of the Royal Martyr with his plumed hat, lace
collar, and melancholy fatal face; of the Old and Young Pretenders; of
the Princess Louisa Teresia, and of the Cardinal York. In the library
were to be found all kinds of books relating to the career of that
unhappy family: "Ye Tragicall History of ye Stuarts, 1697;" "Memoirs of
King James II., writ by his own hand;" "La Stuartide," an unfinished
epic in the French language by one Jean de Schelandre; "The Fate of
Majesty exemplified in the barbarous and disloyal treatment (by
traitorous and undutiful subjects) of the Kings and Queens of the Royal
House of Stuart," genealogies of the Stuarts in English, French and
Latin; a fine copy of "Eikon Basilike," bound in old red morocco, with
the royal arms stamped upon the cover; and many other volumes on the
same subject, the names of which (although as a boy I was wont to pore
over their contents with profound awe and sympathy) I have now for the
most part forgotten.

Most persons, I suppose, have observed how the example of a successful
ancestor is apt to determine the pursuits of his descendants down to the
third and fourth generations, inclining the lads of this house to the
sea, and of that to the bar, according as the great man of the family
achieved his honors on shipboard, or climbed his way to the woolsack.
The Arbuthnots offered no exception to this very natural law of
selection. They could not help remembering how the famous doctor had
excelled in literature as in medicine; how he had been not only
Physician in Ordinary to Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark, but a
satirist and pamphleteer, a wit and the friend of wits--of such wits as
Pope and Swift, Harley and Bolingbroke. Hence they took, as it were