Chapter 3

Sir Jeoffry Wildairs

It was not common in those days for young gentlemen of quality to love
their books too dearly; in truth, men of all ranks and ages were given
rather to leaving learning and the effort to acquire it to those who
depended upon professions to gain their bread for them. Men of rank and
fortune had too many amusements which required no aid from books,
which, indeed, were not greatly the fashion. For country gentlemen
there was hunting, coursing, cock-fights, the exhilarating watching of
cudgelling bouts between yokels, besides visiting, and much eating and
drinking and smoking of tobacco while jovial, and sometimes not too
fastidious stories were told. When a man went up to town he had other
pleasures to fill his time, and whether he was a country gentleman
making his yearly visit or a fashionable rake and beau, his
entertainment was not usually derived from books, a man who spent much
time with them being indeed generally regarded as a milksop. But from
the time when he lay stretched upon his nursery floor and gazed at
pictures and lettering he had not learned to read, the little Marquess
had a fondness for books. He learned to read early, and once having
learned, was never so full of pleasure as when he had a volume to pore
over. At first he revelled in stories of magicians, giants, afrits, and
gnomes, but as soon as his tutors took him in hand he wakened every day
to some new interest. Languages ancient and modern he learned with
great rapidity, having a special fondness for them, and at thirteen
could speak French, high Dutch, and Italian excellently well for his
years, besides having a scholarly knowledge of Latin and Greek. His
tutor, Mr. Fox, an elderly scholar of honourable birth and many
attainments, was as proud of his talents and advancement as his female
attendants had been of his strength and beauty in his infancy. This
gentleman, whose income had been reduced by misfortune, who had lost
his wife and children tragically by one illness, and who had come to
undertake his pupil an almost brokenhearted man, found in the promise
of this young mind a solace he had never hoped to know again.

"I have taught young gentlemen before," he remarked privately to
Mistress Halsell--"one at least with royal blood in his veins, though
he was not called prince--but my lord Marquess has a fire I have seen
in no other. To set him to work upon a new branch of study is like
setting a flame to brushwood. 'Tis as though he burned his way to that
he would reach." The same fire expressed itself in all he did. He was
passionately fond of all boyish sports, and there was no bodily feat he
undertook which he did not finally perform better than others of his
age performed it. He