CHAPTER III.

Thus does a false ambition rule us,
Thus pomp delude, and folly fool us.
--Shenstone.

An open house, haunted with great resort.
--Bishop Hall's Satires.

I left Cambridge in a very weak state of health; and as nobody had yet
come to London, I accepted the invitation of Sir Lionel Garrett to pay
him a visit at his country seat. Accordingly, one raw winter's day, full
of the hopes of the reviving influence of air and exercise, I found
myself carefully packed up in three great coats, and on the high road to
Garrett Park.

Sir Lionel Garrett was a character very common in England, and, in
describing him, I describe the whole species. He was of an ancient
family, and his ancestors had for centuries resided on their estates in
Norfolk. Sir Lionel, who came to his majority and his fortune at the same
time, went up to London at the age of twenty-one, a raw, uncouth sort of
young man, in a green coat and lank hair. His friends in town were of
that set whose members are above ton, whenever they do not grasp at its
possession, but who, whenever they do, lose at once their aim and their
equilibrium, and fall immeasurably below it. I mean that set which I call
"the respectable," consisting of old peers of an old school; country
gentlemen, who still disdain not to love their wine and to hate the
French; generals who have served in the army; elder brothers who succeed
to something besides a mortgage; and younger brothers who do not mistake