Endymion | Page 5

But Ferrars had not to wait. His father,
who watched his career with the passionate interest with which a
Newmarket man watches the development of some gifted yearling,
took care that all the odds should be in his favour in the race of life. An
old colleague of the elder Mr. Ferrars, a worthy peer with many
boroughs, placed a seat at the disposal of the youthful hero, the moment
he was prepared to accept it, and he might be said to have left the
University only to enter the House of Commons.
There, if his career had not yet realised the dreams of his youthful
admirers, it had at least been one of progress and unbroken prosperity.
His first speech was successful, though florid, but it was on foreign
affairs, which permit rhetoric, and in those days demanded at least one

Virgilian quotation. In this latter branch of oratorical adornment Ferrars
was never deficient. No young man of that time, and scarcely any old
one, ventured to address Mr. Speaker without being equipped with a
Latin passage. Ferrars, in this respect, was triply armed. Indeed, when
he entered public life, full of hope and promise, though disciplined to a
certain extent by his mathematical training, he had read very little more
than some Latin writers, some Greek plays, and some treatises of
Aristotle. These with a due course of Bampton Lectures and some
dipping into the "Quarterly Review," then in its prime, qualified a man
in those days, not only for being a member of Parliament, but becoming
a candidate for the responsibility of statesmanship. Ferrars made his
way; for two years he was occasionally asked by the minister to speak,
and then Lord Castlereagh, who liked young men, made him a Lord of
the Treasury. He was Under-Secretary of State, and "very rising," when
the death of Lord Liverpool brought about the severance of the Tory
party, and Mr. Ferrars, mainly under the advice of zealots, resigned his
office when Mr. Canning was appointed Minister, and cast in his lot
with the great destiny of the Duke of Wellington.
The elder Ferrars had the reputation of being wealthy. It was supposed
that he had enjoyed opportunities of making money, and had availed
himself of them, but this was not true. Though a cynic, and with little
respect for his fellow-creatures, Ferrars had a pride in official purity,
and when the Government was charged with venality and corruption,
he would observe, with a dry chuckle, that he had seen a great deal of
life, and that for his part he would not much trust any man out of
Downing Street. He had been unable to resist the temptation of
connecting his life with that of an individual of birth and rank; and in a
weak moment, perhaps his only one, he had given his son a stepmother
in a still good-looking and very expensive Viscountess- Dowager.
Mr. Ferrars was anxious that his son should make a great alliance, but
he was so distracted between prudential considerations and his desire
that in the veins of his grand-children there should flow blood of
undoubted nobility, that he could never bring to his purpose that clear
and concentrated will which was one of the causes of his success in life;
and, in the midst of his perplexities, his son unexpectedly settled the

question himself. Though naturally cold and calculating, William
Ferrars, like most of us, had a vein of romance in his being, and it
asserted itself. There was a Miss Carey, who suddenly became the
beauty of the season. She was an orphan, and reputed to be no
inconsiderable heiress, and was introduced to the world by an aunt who
was a duchess, and who meant that her niece should be the same.
Everybody talked about them, and they went everywhere--among other
places to the House of Commons, where Miss Carey, spying the
senators from the old ventilator in the ceiling of St. Stephen's Chapel,
dropped in her excitement her opera-glass, which fell at the feet of Mr.
Under-Secretary Ferrars. He hastened to restore it to its beautiful owner,
whom he found accompanied by several of his friends, and he was not
only thanked, but invited to remain with them; and the next day he
called, and he called very often afterwards, and many other things
happened, and at the end of July the beauty of the season was married
not to a Duke, but to a rising man, who Zenobia, who at first
disapproved of the match--for Zenobia never liked her male friends to
marry--was sure would one day be Prime Minister of England.
Mrs. Ferrars was of the same opinion as Zenobia, for she was ambitious,
and the dream was captivating. And Mrs. Ferrars soon gained Zenobia's
good graces, for she