JANUARY, 1860.
| Framley Parsonage. | 1 |
| The Chinese and the “Outer Barbarians.” | 26 |
| Lovel the Widower. | 44 |
| Studies in Animal Life. | 61 |
| Father Prout’s Inaugurative Ode | 75 |
| Our Volunteers. | 77 |
| A Man of Letters of the Last Generation. | 85 |
| The Search for Sir John Franklin. | 96 |
| The First Morning of 1860. | 122 |
| Roundabout Papers.—No. I. | 124 |
“Omnes omnia bona dicere.”
When young Mark Robarts was leaving college, his father might welldeclare that all men began to say all good things to him, and to extolhis fortune in that he had a son blessed with so excellent a disposition.
This father was a physician living at Exeter. He was a gentlemanpossessed of no private means, but enjoying a lucrative practice, whichhad enabled him to maintain and educate a family with all the advantageswhich money can give in this country. Mark was his eldest son andsecond child; and the first page or two of this narrative must be consumedin giving a catalogue of the good things which chance and conduct togetherhad heaped upon this young man’s head.
His first step forward in life had arisen from his having been sent,while still very young, as a private pupil to the house of a clergyman,who was an old friend and intimate friend of his father’s. This clergymanhad one other, and only one other, pupil—the young Lord Lufton, and,between the two boys, there had sprung up a close alliance.
While they were both so placed, Lady Lufton had visited her son, andthen invited young Robarts to pass his next holidays at Framley Court.This visit was made; and it ended in Mark going back to Exeter with aletter full of praise from the widowed peeress. She had been delighted,she said, in having such a companion for her son, and expressed a hopethat the boys might remain together during the course of their education.Dr. Robarts was a man who thought much of the breath of peers andpeeresses, and was by no means inclined to throw away any advantagewhich might arise to his child from such a friendship. When, therefore,the young lord was sent to Harrow, Mark Robarts went there also.
That the lord and his friend often quarrelled, and occasionally foug