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.