Sir Lucius was terribly distressed by his father's anger and disappointment. "Very conscious to himself of his offence and transgression, and the consequence of it, though he could not repent, having married a lady of a most extraordinary wit and judgment, and of the most signal virtue and exemplary life that the age produced, and who brought him many hopeful children in which he took great delight; yet he confessed it with the most sincere and dutiful applications to his father for his pardon that could be made."1 With characteristically impulsive generosity, Lucius then offered to make over the whole of his property to his father, and actually went so far as to have the legal conveyance prepared. "But his father's passion and indignation" (to resume Clarendon's vivid narrative which it were a sin to paraphrase) "so far transported him (though he was a gentleman of excellent parts) that he refused any reconciliation and rejected all the offers that were made him of the estate: so that his son remained still in the possession of his estate against his will, for which he found great reason afterwards to rejoice." As did many others, including Mr. Hyde. So deeply, however, did Lucius feel the breach with his father, that he determined to take his wife abroad, with the intention of purchasing a military command in Holland, and spending his life as a soldier of fortune. But being disappointed in his hopes, he returned to England resolving, says Clarendon, to "retire to a country life and to his books; that since he was not like to improve himself in arms, he might advance in letters. In this resolution he was so severe (as he was always naturally very intent upon what he was inclined to), that he declared he would not see London in many years, which was the place he loved best in

to the fact that on 29th August, 1624, "Mr. Lucius Cary, sown and heir to the L. Deputie" was made a Freeman of the Corporation of Youghal.

1 Clarendon, Life, i., 45.

all the world." With such success did he devote himself to the study of Greek, which apparently was quite new to him, that within two years he had read "not only the Greek historians, but Homer likewise, and such of the poets as were worthy to be perused".

Some two years after his son's marriage, the elder Falkland, while shooting with the King in Theobald's Park, fell from a stand and broke his leg. An amputation was performed, but blood-poisoning set in, and in spite of the devoted nursing of his wife, after a week's illness, he died. Though reconciled to his wife he never forgave his son.

Sir Lucius Cary now succeeded to the Falkland peerage, but to little else save a heavily burdened property. In order to settle his father's affairs, the new Lord Falkland was compelled to interrupt his voluntary exile at Great Tew, and spend some time in London. The first lord had never been free from monetary difficulties: his wife, as we have seen, had been induced to mortgage the estates settled upon her, a proceeding which was the immediate cause of her quarrel with her father, and the loss of her paternal inheritance. It is small wonder, therefore, that at his death his affairs were found to be terribly involved, and that in order to pay off the mortgages the younger Falkland was compelled to sell what Clarendon describes as "a finer seat of his own". This can only refer to Burford Priory, which was sold to William Lenthall, afterwards Speaker of the House of Commons, for £7,000.

Having completed the business rendered necessary by his father's death, Falkland returned to Great Tew, there to resume, for a time all too short, a life of learned leisure and strenuous ease. That life, as depicted by the magic pen of Clarendon, forms one of the idylls of English prose.

CHAPTER II

GREAT TEW-SIBI ET AMICIS

HERE still remain some spots in England which,

despite their charm, are little known and comparatively remote. Among these not the least beautiful and not the least remote is the district of the Oxfordshire uplands. Rising from the valley of the Cherwell on the east, and from that of the "stripling Thames" on the west, this well-wooded land was almost covered in times past by the royal forests of Wychwood and Woodstock. It is now enclosed and dotted with small country towns and picturesque stone-built villages. In the very heart of this pleasant land, and far from the ordinary haunts of man, nestles the lovely village of Great Tew-memorable to all time as the home where Falkland spent the happiest and most tranquil years of his brief and storm-tossed life.

Clarendon describes Great Tew as being "within ten or twelve miles of the University". In our modern mileage it is about seventeen as the crow flies, and nearer twenty by road. It lies a few miles off the main road from Banbury to Chipping Norton, but considerably nearer to the latter town. "The stranger who approaches it from any side except the north is quite unprepared," says a recent writer, "to come upon so picturesque a spot. After travelling for miles over high open stretches of cultivated down, he suddenly enters a forest-like country, and in a few moments finds