“ALFRED PERCY.
“P.S.—I open my letter to tell you a delightful piece of news—that Lord Oldborough has taken Temple for his private secretary, and will bring him in for the borough of ——. How his lordship found him out to be the author of that famous pamphlet, which bore Cunningham’s name, I do not know. I know that I kept the secret, as in honour bound; but Lord Oldborough has the best ways and means of obtaining intelligence of any man in England. It is singular that he never said one word about the pamphlet to Temple, nor ever appeared to him to know that it was his writing. I cannot understand this.”
To comprehend why Lord Oldborough had never mentioned the pamphlet to Mr. Temple, it was necessary to know more than Alfred had opportunities of discovering of this minister’s character. His lordship did not choose to acknowledge to the world that he had been duped by Cunningham Falconer. Lord Oldborough would sooner repair an error than acknowledge it. Not that he was uncandid; but he considered candour as dangerous and impolitic in a public character.
Upon some occasion, soon after Mr. Temple came to be his lordship’s secretary, Mr. Temple acknowledged to a gentleman, in Lord Oldborough’s presence, some trifling official mistake he had made: Lord Oldborough, as soon as the gentleman was gone, said to his secretary, “Sir, if you make a mistake, repair it—that is sufficient. Sir, you are young in political life—you don’t know, I see, that candour hurts a political character in the opinion of fools—that is, of the greater part of mankind. Candour may be advantageous to a moral writer, or to a private gentleman, but not to a minister of state. A statesman, if he would govern public opinion, must establish a belief in his infallibility.”
Upon this principle Lord Oldborough abided, not only by his own measures, but by his own instruments—right or wrong, he was known to support those whom he had once employed or patronised. Lucky this for the Falconer family!
LETTER FROM ALFRED TO ERASMUS.
“MY DEAR DOCTOR,
“How I pity you who have no vacations! Please, when next you sum up the advantages and disadvantages of the professions of law and medicine, to set down vacations to the credit side of the law. You who work for life and death can have no pause, no respite; whilst I from time to time may, happily, leave all the property, real and personal, of my fellow-creatures, to its lawful or unlawful owners. Now, for six good weeks to come, I may hang sorrow and cast away care, and forget the sound and smell of parchments, and the din of the courts.
“Here I am, a happy prisoner at large, in this nutshell of a house at the Hills, which you have never seen since it has become the family mansion. I am now in the actual tenure and occupation of the little room, commonly called Rosamond’s room, bounded on the N. E. W. and S. by blank—[N.B. a very dangerous practice of leaving blanks for your boundaries in your leases, as an eminent attorney told me last week.] Said room containing in the whole 14 square feet 4-1/2 square inches, superficial measure, be the same more or less. I don’t know how my father and mother, and sisters, who all their lives were used to range in spacious apartments, can live so happily, cooped up as they now are; but their bodies, as well as minds, seem to have a contractile power, which adapts them to their present confined circumstances. Procrustes, though he was a mighty tyrant, could fit only the body to the bed. I found all at home as cheerful and contented as in the days when we lived magnificently at Percy-hall. I have not seen the Hungerfords yet; Colonel H. is, I hear, attached to Lady Elizabeth Pembroke. I know very little of her, but Caroline assures me she is an amiable, sensible woman, well suited to him, and to all his family. I need not, however, expatiate on this subject, for Caroline says that she wrote you a long letter, the day after she returned from Hungerford Castle.
“I must tell you what has happened to me since I came to the country. Do you remember my receiving a very angry, very ill-spelled letter, from a certain Farmer Grimwood of Pegginton, who swore, that if it cost him a thousand guineas in gold he would have the law of the doctor—viz. Dr. Leicester—about a tithe of peaches? My father, at my request, was so good as to send for said Grimwood, and to prevent him from having recourse in his ire to Attorney Sharpe. With prodigious difficulty, the angry farmer was restrained till my arrival; when I came home, I found him waiting for me, and literally foaming at the mouth with the furious desire for law. I flatter myself, I did listen to his story with a patience for which Job might have been admired. I was well aware that till he had exhausted himself, and was practically convinced that he had nothing more to say, he would be incapable of listening to me, or to the voice of the angel of peace. When at last absolute fatigue of reiteration had reduced him to silence, when he had held me by the button till he was persuaded he had made me fully master of his case, I prevailed upon him to let me hear what could be said on the opposite side of the question; and after some hours’ cross-examination of six witnesses, repeaters, and reporters, and after an infinite confusion of said I’s, and said he’s, it was made clearly to appear that the whole quarrel originated in the mistake of a few words in a message which Dr. Leicester’s agent had given to his son, a boy of seven years old, who had left it with a deaf gate-keeper of seventy-six, who repeated it to Farmer Grimwood, at a moment when the farmer was over-heated and overtired, and consequently prone to misunderstanding and to anger. The most curious circumstance in the whole business is, that the word peaches had never been mentioned by Dr. Leicester’s agent in the original message; and Dr. Leicester really did not know that Mr. Grimwood of Pegginton was possessed of a single peach. Grimwood, though uncommonly obstinate and slow, is a just man; and when I at last brought the facts with indisputable evidence home to his understanding, he acknowledged that he had been too hasty, rejoiced that he had not gone to law, begged the doctor and the doctor’s agent’s pardon, thanked me with his whole honest heart, and went home in perfect charity with all mankind. Mr. Sharpe, who soon heard of the amicable conclusion of this affair, laughs at me, and pronounces that I shall never make a lawyer, and that my friends need never flatter themselves with the notion of my rising at the bar.