An old setter lay dozing at his feet; a small spaniel--old, too--was sauntering lazily in the immediate neighbourhood, looking gravely out for such stray bits of biscuit as had been thrown forth to provoke him to exercise, and which hitherto had escaped his attention.

Half seated, half reclined on the balustrade, apart from the baronet, but within reach of his conversation, lolled a man in the prime of life, with an air of unmistakable and sovereign elegance and distinction.

Mr.Vernon was a guest from London; and the London man,--the man of clubs and dinners and routs, of noon loungings through Bond Street, and nights spent with the Prince of Wales,--seemed stamped not more upon the careful carelessness of his dress, and upon the worn expression of his delicate features, than upon the listless ennui, which, characterizing both his face and attitude, appeared to take pity on himself for having been entrapped into the country.
Yet we should convey an erroneous impression of Mr.Vernon if we designed, by the words "listless ennui," to depict the slumberous insipidity of more modern affectation; it was not the ennui of a man to whom ennui is habitual, it was rather the indolent prostration that fills up the intervals of excitement.

At that day the word blast was unknown; men had not enough sentiment for satiety.

There was a kind of Bacchanalian fury in the life led by those leaders of fashion, among whom Mr.Vernon was not the least distinguished; it was a day of deep drinking, of high play, of jovial, reckless dissipation, of strong appetite for fun and riot, of four-in-hand coachmanship, of prize-fighting, of a strange sort of barbarous manliness that strained every nerve of the constitution,--a race of life in which three fourths of the competitors died half-way in the hippodrome.