CHAPTER III.
Thus does a false ambition rule us, Thus pomp delude, and folly fool us.
-- Shenstone.
An open house, haunted with great resort .-- Bishop Hall's Satires.
I left Cambridge in a very weak state of health; and as nobody had yet come to London, I accepted the invitation of Sir Lionel Garrett to pay him a visit at his country seat.

Accordingly, one raw winter's day, full of the hopes of the reviving influence of air and exercise, I found myself carefully packed up in three great coats, and on the high road to Garrett Park.
Sir Lionel Garrett was a character very common in England, and, in describing him, I describe the whole species.

He was of an ancient family, and his ancestors had for centuries resided on their estates in Norfolk.

Sir Lionel, who came to his majority and his fortune at the same time, went up to London at the age of twenty-one, a raw, uncouth sort of young man, in a green coat and lank hair.

His friends in town were of that set whose members are above ton, whenever they do not grasp at its possession, but who, whenever they do, lose at once their aim and their equilibrium, and fall immeasurably below it.