Tales of Two People

COMMON opinion said that Lord Lynborough ought never to have had a peerage and forty thousand a year; he ought to have had a pound a week and a back bedroom in Bloomsbury. Then he would have become an eminent man; as it was, he turned out only a singularly erratic individual. So much for common opinion. Let no more be heard of its dull utilitarian judgments There are plenty of eminent men-at the moment, it is believed, no less than seventy Cabinet and ex-Cabinet Ministers (or thereabouts)-to say nothing of Bishops, Judges, and the British Academy-and all this in a nook of the world (And the world too is a point ) Lynborough was something much more uncommon; it is not, however, quite easy to say what. Let the question be postponed; perhaps the story itself will answer it. He started life-or was started in it-in a series of surroundings of unimpeachable orthodoxy-Eton, Christ Church, the Grenadier Guards.