Mr. Pole smiled, bowed, and disappeared; and Lady Monteagle sat down
to write a billet to Lord Cadurcis, to entreat him to be with her at
five o'clock, which was at least half an hour before the other guests
were expected. The Monteagles were considered to dine ridiculously
late.
CHAPTER II.
Marmion Herbert, sprung from one of the most illustrious families in
England, became at an early age the inheritor of a great estate, to
which, however, he did not succeed with the prejudices or opinions
usually imbibed or professed by the class to which he belonged. While
yet a boy, Marmion Herbert afforded many indications of possessing a
mind alike visionary and inquisitive, and both, although not in an
equal degree, sceptical and creative. Nature had gifted him with
precocious talents; and with a temperament essentially poetic, he
was nevertheless a great student. His early reading, originally by
accident and afterwards by an irresistible inclination, had fallen
among the works of the English freethinkers: with all their errors,
a profound and vigorous race, and much superior to the French
philosophers, who were after all only their pupils and their
imitators. While his juvenile studies, and in some degree the
predisposition of his mind, had thus prepared him to doubt and finally
to challenge the propriety of all that was established and received,
the poetical and stronger bias of his mind enabled him quickly to
supply the place of everything he would remove and destroy; and, far
from being the victim of those frigid and indifferent feelings
which must ever be the portion of the mere doubter, Herbert, on the
contrary, looked forward with ardent and sanguine enthusiasm to a
glorious and ameliorating future, which should amply compensate and
console a misguided and unhappy race for the miserable past and
the painful and dreary present.
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