The neighbourhood of Oxford is low and flat, and except where a few lights marked the outskirts of the city a wall of darkness shut them in, permitting nothing to be seen that lay more than a few paces away.

A grey drift of clouds, luminous in comparison with the gloom about them, moved slowly overhead, and out of the night the raving of a farm-dog or the creaking of a dry bough came to the ear with melancholy effect.
The fine gentleman of that day had no taste for the wild, the rugged, or the lonely.

He lived too near the times when those words spelled danger.
He found at Almack's his most romantic scene, at Ranelagh his _terra incognita_, in the gardens of Versailles his ideal of the charming and picturesque.

Sir George, no exception to the rule, shivered as he looked round.

He began to experience a revulsion of spirits; and to consider that, for a gentleman who owned Lord Chatham for a patron, and was even now on his roundabout way to join that minister--for a gentleman whose fortune, though crippled and impaired, was still tolerable, and who, where it had suffered, might look with confidence to see it made good at the public expense--or to what end patrons or ministers ?--he began to reflect, I say, that for such an one to exchange a peer's coach and good company for a night trudge at a woman's heels was a folly, better befitting a boy at school than a man of his years.