be fallen back upon, it is very certain, not only that the Reverend Ruthyn Pendragon was no gentleman, but that he was, on the contrary, an exceedingly vulgar person.

There had been curates and curates at Swordsley. The rector, who was deaf, paralytic, and all but blind, had been taken care of for a long period by his relatives, who found the mild and genial climate of Torquay most suited to his infirm state of health. The large revenues of the incumbency had been carefully paid in to the bankers of the Reverend Mr. Marrowfat-that was the name of the invalid rector; and the successive curates had been as punctually paid their small and not increasing stipends. The evil-tongued, who were neither more nor less numerous at Swordsley than elsewhere, averred that the patroness in ordinary to ecclesiastical preferment under the Rector of Swordsley was a certain Mrs. Gryphon, by the mother's side a Marrow fat, by conjugal relation the widow of a broken shipbroker, and who was good enough to officiate as housekeeper, companion, and general locum tenens to the infirm clerical gentleman. She did every thing for him. She opened his letters, and read those which he received; nay, after the Reverend Mr. Marrowfat's death, human malignity went so far as to say—in the great probate case of Marrowfat and Wife versus Gryphon-that this indefatigable widow-lady made the rector's will for him, and had it all her own way in making it. This, however, is only by the way. I am afraid that she did appoint the curates, and that the advent of the ecclesiastic who stammered, and of the other one who had no H's, must be laid to her charge. Of the red-headed curate, however, Mrs. Gryphon must be held blameless. He of the scarlet locks was a nominee of the Chucklebuxes, a rival branch of the Marrow fat family, who obtained temporary dominion over the poor old clergyman during an absence of Mrs. Gryphon in London. The widow had a graceless nephew,-a Gryphon, not a Marrowfat,—who, having spent a large legacy, principally in hire of dogcarts, and the purchase of cherry-brandy, shirts of extraordinary pattern, and coloured lithographs of eminent dramatic performers, had enlisted in the Hussars, but was speedily bought off from the draff and husks of the depôt at Maidstone by his affectionate aunt. Having unsuccessfully tempted fortune as a commercial traveller for an article in general demand (the celebrated steel-edged wooden razors), as a billiardmarker, and as a frequenter of certain dry skittle-alleys, whither gentlemen of agricultural appearance were brought to play, and where, it is said, they were sometimes drugged and robbed, young Ripton Gryphon again enlisted; this time in her Majesty's infantry of the line. He was again bought off; and after enjoying for a short time an appointment in the metropolitan police force, from which he was dismissed for a fault, harmless in itself, but highly subversive of discipline, being that of offering to fight his inspector for half a crown, this gay youth became an omnibus conductor, a waiter at a tavern where the hours were rather early than late, and an attendant at fictitious auctions, where his business was to bid for gigantic plated cruet-stands, and, with an air of extreme

solicitude, to inspect curiously inlaid writing-desks, handed round for that purpose on a japanned tea-tray. In this place of business he was ordinarily known by the familiar sobriquet of "Rip the bonnet." If I have mentioned the peculiar phases in the career of this sportive young man, it has been merely to mark the strong points of contrast in his character. Ripton Gryphon was exceedingly intelligent. His education had been excellent. He was a good classical scholar, a ready speaker, and he wrote a beautiful hand. These acquirements did not in the least militate against his being, root and branch, a hopeless and incurable scamp. With that odd perversity not uncommon to her sex, Mrs. Gryphon positively adored this lamentable scapegrace; and as he happened to be at the same time tall, curly-haired, straight of limb, bright of eye, and generally good-looking, the widow declared that her Ripton was born to be a gentleman; that he would sow his wild oats; that he should go into the Church, and that a country curacy was the very thing to suit him, pending, of course, his elevation to the episcopal bench. To all appearance, it certainly seemed that the soil of Mr. Ripton Gryphon's moral nature had been exhausted by the cultivation of wild oats, and that unless it lay fallow for a time it was not likely to produce any thing but an abundant crop of hemp; but with the energy and audacity characteristic of a lady accustomed to deal only with weak and timid people, and to work her will upon them, Mrs. Gryphon set about converting a young fellow who was bidding fair to graduate at the hulks into a candidate for holy orders. She found out the easy chaplain to an easy bishop, who had already ordained a gentleman not quite right in his head for a living near the Land's End, and another who was not quite right in his morals for a chaplaincy in the West Indies. Mrs. Gryphon learned to know, as some of us know, and as all of us ought to know, that other means exist for wearing a cassock and bands, and tacking reverend' to one's name, besides taking a university degree. The easy chaplain recommended her to a tutor for her Ripton,-a college man, a ripe scholar, who had taken deacon's orders, who was as proud as Lucifer and as poor as Job, and whose name was Ruthyn Pendragon. The graceless nephew was confided to the care of this instructor, and in a quiet retirement at Clapham, supported from the widow-lady's funds, did, for a certain period, make some progress in leaving off sack and living cleanly, like a gentleman. What is a gentleman? It was during the sojourn of Mrs. Gryphon in London, of course in the interests of her protégé, that the Chucklebux faction achieved a momentary triumph; and the reverend gentleman who had no H's, having married a lady who had two thousand pounds, and so resigned his appointment, brought in the curate with the red head. Mrs. Gryphon returned to Torquay in a rage, and the shock of her temper was almost too much for the poor old rector. She was appeased, however, by abject concessions, and the immediate and ignominious dismissal of the entire Chucklebux faction (the danger was imminent; for there was one Chucklebux who was medical, of the homoeopathic persuasion, and who

was also a distinguished amateur will-maker); and she soon resumed her empire over her reverend patient and relative. So hard did this lady work towards the accomplishment of her purpose, so various were her resources, so strong was her will, so feeble were those with whom she had to deal, that I for one should not have been surprised if success had crowned her enterprise, and if Ripton Gryphon had at last crept through the hawse-holes on board the ecclesiastical bark. Stranger things have happened, believe me. I am not writing from imagination, or without book. All the widow's plots and schemes were, alas, foiled by Ripton Gryphon taking it into his head to vindicate his natural character. He ran away from Mr. Pendragon, his tutor, and was not heard of any more. Many a similar scapegrace, whose relatives are vainly inquiring after him, or, through the medium of newspaper advertisements, as vainly entreating him to return, is quietly tried under a false name at some provincial, assizes, and quietly transported, without any body save some chance gaoler being the wiser for it. "That's a baronet, sir," said a convict's-warder to me once on Southsea Common, pointing to a peculiarly villanous-looking individual in cross-barred canvas and an oil-skin hat, who was leisurely tickling the turf with his spade,-"that's a baronet, and kep' his 'osses and his 'ounds. But, Lord love you, sir, he ain't at Portsmouth, leastways as his genteel fam'ly think. Must live abroad for his 'elth, sir. He's at Paw, in the Pyrenees, a living in his own chatow, is that baronet." But what became of Ripton Gryphon there was no deponent to say. He went away, and didn't come back. He may have subsided into penal servitude, as has already been hinted. up swollen, blue, ghastly, and drowned, in the ooze of some riverain creek, and have passed from a parish dead-house to a parish grave. He may have enlisted again, have died on board a transport, and been flung to the fishes. He may have been murdered. Who knows? Men pass and pass in the great glass of Life like the Kings in Macbeth's vision; and there is no remembrance of those that have gone before, and no knowledge of those that are to come afterwards.

He may have turned

Who, for instance, could have foretold that Ruthyn Pendragon, the tutor of the graceless scion of the Gryphons, would have ever become curate of Swordsley! yet it was his kismet, his fate, to occupy that post. By one of those odd coincidences which are perpetually baffling and perplexing us, Pendragon, having passed into priests' orders, was recommended to the new rector of Swordsley,-poor old Mr. Marrowfat having been gathered to his fathers, and obtained employment from the Reverend Ernest Goldthorpe. It is not fitting to tell how the widow, at once bereaved of her rector and of her nephew, raged and stormed at the course which events had taken. It wasn't Ruthyn Pendragon's fault if Ernest Goldthorpe chose to take him. He wanted a curacy, and Ernest wanted a curate what was more natural? Why should Mrs. Gryphon charge him with the blackest ingratitude, and accuse him of being a traitor and an intriguer. He had not solicited the appointment. It had fallen

in his way, and he had taken it. The widow would have liked to say all kinds of possible things against the new curate; but there was nothing to be said against him. He was stanchly recommended by college magnates. He was eminently learned. His poverty was notorious; but his moral character was without stain. Ernest Goldthorpe was glad to be able to do a service to so able and respectable a young man. So the Gryphon was finally discomfited,-she had got all the rector's money though, and all the Marrowfats and Chucklebuxes, with their lawyers to boot, failed in dispossessing her thereof,—and the Reverend Ruthyn Pendragon was curate to the Rector of Swordsley.

Stay,-learning, respectability, character, all granted, there might have been one little thing to be alleged against the Reverend Ruthyn Pendragon. He was a very vulgar person. He had plenty of H's, and used them in the right place, but he was desperately vulgar. He looked like a vulgar person. He talked like one. He ate and drank like one. He dressed like one. There was a vague but uncertain vulgarity in his face, his smile, his deameanour. His bold, firm, defined handwriting was vulgar to every cross of a t, to every dot of an i. When he first entered the presence of Lady Talmash, that aristocratic churchwoman held up her hands, and whispered to Magdalen, "However comes that boor by the name of Pendragon ?"

By lineage Ruthyn was a gentleman of the most ancient descent. What were Normans, Saxons, Danes, to his old stock? He sprang from the genuine Phoenician stock, as I suppose all the Tre, Pols, and Pens of Cornwall do. Ruthyn came from that famous although somewhat remote province. Unhappily there were no tin-mines in his family, nor, had Pendragon died, would there have been twenty thousand or ten underground in Cornwall anxious to know the reason why. He had no money. He was an orphan, and alone in the world.

An old grandmother at St. Mawes had brought this vulgar person up. She did what she could for him, and her small savings were laid out for his benefit. Ruthyn's father was a gentleman, who, about the year 1825, in company with other adventurous Cornish men, had gone in quest of some silver-mines in Peru, and found the vomito nero instead, of which, at Lima, he straightway died. The old grandmother did what she could for the orphan, which was not much. The father had, on the principle of conveying coals to Newcastle, taken most of the available ready money of the family with him to the silver-mines of Peru. In after years Ruthyn Pendragon did not mind confessing that in his boyhood he had made a voyage in a fishing-smack, with a view to see whether he would like to be apprenticed to the sea; and that he had served a short probation behind the shop-counter of a chemist, who likewise sold grocery and haberdashery, at Truro. These early associations may have been instrumental in planting the first seeds of that vulgarity for which Ruthyn Pendragon was always noted, and for which he eventually became famous. In process of time a Cornish gentleman

of means, who had known the paternal Pendragon, advised Ruthyn's grandmother to send him to a certain ancient and well-known grammarschool in the West Country. He made great progress in his studies here, and was commended by his master as a very diligent and capable boy, while he was excepted to by his schoolfellows as being a pitiably vulgar one. He obtained an exhibition at last, and took that, and his vulgarity, and a huge stock (for a boy) of book-learning, and a vast fund of natural shrewdness, observation, and humour, with him to college. Any thing else? well, he had a slender wardrobe, and his grandmother's blessing. His successes at the university were solid, if not brilliant. It is said of him, that leaving school and entering the mail-coach which was to convey him to town, Ruthyn Pendragon flung his hat into the air, and cried, "Here goes for Archbishop of Canterbury;" but at the university it was speedily decided that such a vulgar fellow would never obtain a fellowship, while doubts were expressed as to whether any gentlemanly bishop could ever be persuaded to ordain such a lout. He was not likely to go wrong at the university. His health was of the rudest, his frame of the strongest; and excesses of dissipation would have hurt him no more than excess of study; but he was wise, and chose the latter. He read desperately and continuously. All that the gay youth of the university could say against him was that he was vulgar. They could not in their charmingly contemptuous manner call him a "cad." There was no denying his gentle blood. There was no finding a blot on his scutcheon. His great-greatgrandfather was duly enshrined in Fuller's Worthies; a great-granduncle was mentioned in Anthony à Wood. The university tradesmen refrained from soliciting his custom; they knew that he could do them no good, and that they could do him no harm. Of what use were well-cut coats and brilliant scarves to one who, winter and summer, wore a plain black coat, which he acknowledged to have bought second-hand, and to mend himself when it required repair; and beneath that a waistcoat and trousers of coarse gray serge, made by his old grandmother at St. Mawes? Where he first purchased his cap and gown was a mystery; the triflers declared that he had bought them at a London masquerade warehouse, on his way to college. They were certainly curiosities of faded shabbiness. His linen was dreadfully coarse, but scrupulously clean. He was in the habit of biting the nails to the quick, and no scissors were needed for his large healthy-looking hands. His hair was naturally dark and glossy, and he needed no Macassar. He looked like a man who washed with yellow soap. He never had a row with the bargemen on the river. They respected and feared him, not alone for his strength, which was palpably prodigious, but for his homely, kindly manners; for he was not above. holding the poorest and roughest in discourse, and would talk to them. by the half-hour together of common things and their daily avocations. He was not vulgar to them. Some called him a true gentleman,” but more frequently working-men exclaimed: "We likes him, for he talks like one of us." Clearly a very vulgar person this Ruthyn Pendragon.