reason why he was so much thought of. He had been by far the most
brilliant boy of his time at Eton,--not only the boast of the cricket-
ground, but the marvel of the schoolroom; yet so full of whims and
oddities, and seeming to achieve his triumphs with so little aid from
steadfast application, that he had not left behind him the same
expectations of solid eminence which his friend and senior, Audley
Egerton, had excited. His eccentricities, his quaint sayings, and out-
of-the-way actions, became as notable in the great world as they had been
in the small one of a public school. That he was very clever there was
no doubt, and that the cleverness was of a high order might be surmised,
not only from the originality but the independence of his character. He
dazzled the world, without seeming to care for its praise or its
censure,--dazzled it, as it were, because he could not help shining. He
had some strange notions, whether political or social, which rather
frightened his father. According to Southey, "A man should be no more
ashamed of having been a republican than of having been young." Youth
and extravagant opinions naturally go together. I don't know whether
Harley L'Estrange was a republican at the age of eighteen; but there was
no young man in London who seemed to care less for being heir to an
illustrious name and some forty or fifty thousand pounds a year. It was
a vulgar fashion in that day to play the exclusive, and cut persons who
wore bad neckcloths, and called themselves Smith or Johnson. Lord
L'Estrange never cut any one, and it was quite enough to slight some
worthy man because of his neckcloth or his birth to insure to the
offender the pointed civilities of this eccentric successor to the
Belforts and the Wildairs.

It was the wish of his father that Harley, as soon as he came of age,
should represent the borough of Lansmere (which said borough was the
single plague of the earl's life). But this wish was never realized.