"Don't you consider," he abruptly asked a fellow-guest at Lady Holland's, leaning across the dinner-table in a pause of the conversation, "that it was a most damnable act of Henri Quatre to change his religion with a view to securing the Crown ?" He sat at home, brooding for hours in miserable solitude.

He turned over his books--his classics and his Testaments--but they brought him no comfort at all.

He longed for the return of the past, for the impossible, for he knew not what, for the devilries of Caro, for the happy platitudes of Windsor.

His friends had left him, and no wonder, he said in bitterness--the fire was out.

He secretly hoped for a return to power, scanning the newspapers with solicitude, and occasionally making a speech in the House of Lords.