sphere might have vied with Leila's snow court in Thalaba for coldness and quiet.
Lord Lauriston was one of those mistakes which sometimes fall out between nature and fortune,—nature meant him for a farmer, fortune made him a peer. In society he was a nonentity; he neither talked nor listened—and it is a positive duty to do one or the other; in his own house he resembled one of the old family pictures, hung up for show, and not for use; but in his farm no Cæsar rebuked his genius. Heavens! what attention he bestowed on the growth of his grey pease! how eloquent he could be on the merits of Swedish turnips! and a new drill, or a patent thrashing machine, deprived him of sleep for a week.
In marriage, as in chemistry, opposites have often an attraction. His lady was as different as your matrimonial affinities usually are; society was her element, and London her "city of the soul." Her house and her parties occupied the first years of her marriage, in endeavours to embellish the one, and refine the other; but of late the business of life had grown serious; she had been employed in marrying off her daughters. Her systems of sentiment might have vied with her lord's systems of husbandry;
