He dazzled the world, without seeming to care for its praise or its censure,--dazzled it, as it were, because he could not help shining.

He had some strange notions, whether political or social, which rather frightened his father.

According to Southey, "A man should be no more ashamed of having been a republican than of having been young." Youth and extravagant opinions naturally go together.

I don't know whether Harley L'Estrange was a republican at the age of eighteen; but there was no young man in London who seemed to care less for being heir to an illustrious name and some forty or fifty thousand pounds a year.
It was a vulgar fashion in that day to play the exclusive, and cut persons who wore bad neckcloths, and called themselves Smith or Johnson.
Lord L'Estrange never cut any one, and it was quite enough to slight some worthy man because of his neckcloth or his birth to insure to the offender the pointed civilities of this eccentric successor to the Belforts and the Wildairs.
It was the wish of his father that Harley, as soon as he came of age, should represent the borough of Lansmere (which said borough was the single plague of the earl's life).

But this wish was never realized.
Suddenly, when the young idol of London still wanted some two or three years of his majority, a new whim appeared to seize him.