This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
4
VIVIAN GREY.

trary systems, than those of Frederick Cleveland and Vivian Grey. The systems on which they had been educated were not, however, more discordant than the respective tempers of the pupils. With that of Vivian Grey the reader is now somewhat acquainted. It has been shown that he was one precociously convinced of the necessity of managing mankind by studying their tempers and humouring their weaknesses. Cleveland turned from the Book of Nature with contempt; and although his was a mind of extraordinary acuteness, he was, at three-and-thirty, as ignorant of the workings of the human heart, as when, in the innocence of boyhood, he first reached Eton. The inaptitude of his nature to consult the feelings, or adopt the sentiments of others, was visible in his slightest actions. He was the only man who ever passed three years in Germany, and in a German University, who had never yielded to the magic influence of a Meerschaum; and the