portrait of some youthful Cavalier. On bounded the Spanish jennet, on
rattled the boy rider. He had left school now, in his headlong talk; he
was describing his first friendship with Frank Vance, as a lodger at his
mother's; how example fired him, and he took to sketch-work and painting;
how kindly Vance gave him lessons; how at one time he wished to be a
painter; how much the mere idea of such a thing vexed his mother, and how
little she was moved when he told her that Titian was of a very ancient
family, and that Francis I., archetype of gentleman, visited Leonardo da
Vinci's sick-bed; and that Henry VIII. had said to a pert lord who had
snubbed Holbein, "I can make a lord any day, but I cannot make a
Holbein!" how Mrs. Haughton still confounded all painters in the general
image of the painter and the plumber who had cheated her so shamefully in
the renewed window-sashes and redecorated walls, which Time and the four
children of an Irish family had made necessary to the letting of the
first floor. And these playful allusions to the maternal ideas were
still not irreverent, but contrived so as rather to prepossess Darrell in
Mrs. Haughton's favour by bringing out traits of a simple natural mother,
too proud, perhaps, of her only son, not caring what she did, how she
worked, so that he might not lose caste as a born Haughton. Darrell
understood, and nodded his head approvingly. "Certainly," he said,
speaking almost for the first time, "Fame confers a rank above that of
gentlemen and of kings; and as soon as she issues her patent of nobility,
it matters not a straw whether the recipient be the son of a Bourbon or
of a tallow-chandler. But if Fame withhold her patent; if a well-born
man paint aldermen, and be not famous (and I dare say you would have been
neither a Titian nor a Holbein),--why, he might as well be a painter and
plumber, and has a better chance even of bread and cheese by standing to
his post as gentleman. Mrs. Haughton was right, and I respect her."

"Quite right. If I lived to the age of Methuselah, I could not paint a