His uncle Everard was proud of his good looks, fire, and nonsense, during the boy's extreme youth.

He traced him by cousinships back to the great Earl Beauchamp of Froissart, and would have it so; and he would have spoilt him had not the young fellow's mind been possessed by his reverence for men of deeds.

How could he think of himself, who had done nothing, accomplished nothing, so long as he brooded on the images of signal Englishmen whose names were historic for daring, and the strong arm, and artfulness, all given to the service of the country ?--men of a magnanimity overcast with simplicity, which Nevil held to be pure insular English; our type of splendid manhood, not discoverable elsewhere.

A method of enraging him was to distinguish one or other of them as Irish, Scottish, or Cambrian.

He considered it a dismemberment of the country.