The adventures of Hugh Trevor: By Thomas Holcroft. ... [pt.1]

Table of contents

- [halftitle]

- [titlepage]

- PREFACE.

- CHAP. I.

- CHAP. II.

- CHAP. III.

- CHAP. IV.

- CHAP. V.

- CHAP. VI.

- CHAP. VII.

- CHAP, VIII.

- CHAP. IX.

- CHAP. X.

- CHAP. XI.

- CHAP. XII.

- CHAP. XIII.

- CHAP. XIV.

- CHAP. XV.

- CHAP. XVI.

- CHAP. XVII.

THE ADVENTURES OF HUGH TREVOR.

END OF VOL. I.

THE ADVENTURES OF HUGH TREVOR.

VOL. I.

THE ADVENTURES OF HUGH TREVOR. BY THOMAS HOLCROFT.

—'TIS SO PAT TO ALL THE TRIBE

EACH SWEARS THAT WAS LEVELLED AT ME.

GAY.

VOLUME I.

LONDON: PRINTED FOR SHEPPERSON AND REYNOLDS, NO. 137, OXFORD-STREET. 1794.

PREFACE.

EVERY man of determined inquiry, who will ask, without the dread of discovering more than he dares believe, what is divinity? what is law? what is physic? what is war? and what is trade? will have great reason to doubt at some times of the virtue, and at others of the utility, of each of these different employments. What profession should a man of principle, who is anxiously desirous to promote individual and general happiness, chuse for his son? The question has perplexed many parents, and certainly deserves a serious examination. Is a novel a good mode for discussing it, or a proper vehicle for moral truth? Of this some perhaps will be inclined to doubt. Others, whose intellectual powers were indubitably of the first order, have considered the art of novel writing as very essentially connected with moral instruction. Of this opinion was the famous Turgot, who we are told affirmed that more grand moral truths had been promulgated by novel writers than by any other class of men.

But, though I consider the choice of a profession as the interesting question agitated in the following work, I have endeavoured to keep another important inquiry continually in view. This inquiry is, the growth of intellect. Philosophers have lately paid much attention to the progress of mind; the subject is with good reason become a favourite with them, and the more the individual and the general history of man is examined the more proofs do they discover in support of his perfectability. Man is continually impelled, by the vicissitudes of life, to great vicissitudes of opinion and conduct. He is a being necessarily subject to change; and the inquiry of wisdom ought continually to be, how may he change for the better? From individual facts, and from them alone, can general knowledge be obtained.

Two men of different opinions were once conversing. The one scoffed at innate ideas, instinctive principles, and occult causes: the other was a believer in natural gifts, and an active fabricator of suppositions. Suggest but the slightest hint and he would erect a hypothesis which no argument, at least none that he would listen to, could overthrow. So convinced was he of the force of intuitive powers, and natural propensities, as existing in himself, that, having proposed to write a treatise to prove that apple trees might bear oysters, or something equally true and equally important, he was determined he said to seek for no exterior aid or communication, from books, or things, or men; being convinced that the activity of his own mind would afford intuitive argument, of more worth than all the adulterated and suspicious facts that experience could afford.

To this his antagonist replied, he knew but of one mode of obtaining knowledge; which was by the senses. Whether this knowledge entered at the eye, the ear, the papillary nerves, the olfactory, or by that more general sense which we call feeling, was, he argued, of little consequence; but at some or all of these it must enter, for he had never discovered any other inlet. If however the system of his opponent were true, he could only say that, in all probability, his intended treatise would have been written in the highest perfection had he begun and ended it before he had been born.

If this reasoning be just, I think we may conclude that the man of forty will be somewhat more informed than the infant, who has but just seen the light. Deductions of a like kind will teach us that the collective knowledge of ages is superior to the rude dawning of the savage state; and if this be so, of which I find it difficult to doubt, it surely is not absolutely impossible but that men may continue thus to collect knowledge; and that ten thousand years hence, if this good world should last so long, they may possibly learn their alphabet in something less time than we do even now, in these enlightened days.

For these reasons, I have occasionally called the attention of the reader to the lessons received by the principal character of the following work, to the changes they produced in him, and to the progress of his understanding. I conclude with adding that in my opinion, all well written books, that discuss the actions of men, are in reality so many histories of the progress of mind; and, if what I now suppose be truth, it is highly advantageous to the reader to be aware of this truth.

CHAP. I.

MY BIRTH: FAMILY DIGNITY INSULTED: RESENTMENT OF MY GRANDFATHER: PARENTAL TRAITS OF CHARACTER.

THERE are moments in which every man is apt to imagine, that the history of his own life is the most important of all histories. The gloom and sunshine, with which my short existence has been chequered, lead me to suppose that a narrative of these vicissitudes may be interesting to others, as well as to myself.

In the opinion of some people, my misfortunes began before I was born. The rector of * * *, my grandfather, was as vain or his ancestry, as a German baron: and perhaps with no less reason, being convinced that Adam himself was his great progenitor. My mother, not having the fear of her father before her eyes, forgetful of the family dignity, disgraced herself, and contaminated the blood of her offspring, by marrying a farmer's son. Had she married a gentleman, what that very different being, which a gentleman doubtless must have generated, might have been, is more than I, as I now am, can pretend to divine. As it is, however low it may sink me in the reader's opinion, truth obliges me to own, I am but of a mongrel breed.

The delinquency of my mother was aggravated by the daringness of her disobedience; for the rector, having a foresight of what was likely to happen, had laid his express command on her never to see Hugh Trevor, my father, more, on the very night that she eloped. Add to which, she had the example of an elder sister, to terrify her from such dereliction of duty; who, having married a rake, had been left a widow, poor, desolate, and helpless, and obliged to live an unhappy dependent on her offended father. 'I'll please my eye though I break my heart,' said my mother.

She kept her word. Young Hugh was an athletic, well proportioned, handsome man; of a sanguine temper, prone to pleasure, a frequenter of wakes and fairs, and much addicted to speculate; particularly in cards, cocking, and horse-racing.

Discarded by the rector, who was obstinately irreconcileable, my mother went with her husband to reside in the house of her father-in-law. Folly visits all orders of men. Farmers, as well as lords and rectors, can be proud of their families. The match was considered as an acquisition of dignity to the house of Trevor; and my mother, bringing such an addition of honour, was most graciously received.

Here she remained something more than a year; and here, ten months after the marriage, I was born. I had not openly assumed the form which the vanity of man has dignified with divine above a fortnight, before my grandfather, Trevor, died. He had been what is usually called a good father; had lived in reputation, and had brought up a large and expensive family. But as good in this sense usually signifies indulgent, not wise, he had rather afforded his children the means, and taught them the art, of spending money than of saving. His circumstances were suspected, the creditors were hasty to prefer their claims, and it soon appeared that he had died insolvent. The family was consequently dispersed, and I, thus early, was in danger of being turned, a poor, wailing, imbecil wanderer, on a world in which the sacred rights of meum and tuum daily suffer thousands to perish.

Fortunately, considering the exigence of the moment, my father, who was enterprising, adroit, and loquacious, prevailed on some friends to lend him money to stock the farm, of the lease of which he was now in possession. In this he succeeded the more easily, because he had already acquired the character of an excellent judge of agricultural affairs. He was known to be acute at driving bargains, could value sheep, heifers, steers, and bullocks better than a Leicestershire drover, was an excellent judge of horse flesh, and, during his fathers's life, had several times proved he knew the exact moment of striking earnest. Had fate sent him to a minister's levee instead of a market for quadrupeds, he would have been a great politician! He would have bought and sold with as much dexterity as any dealer in black cattle the kingdom can boast!

At the first approach of misfortune, my mother had felt great despondency; but when she saw her young husband so active, animated, and fruitful in resource, her hopes presently began to brighten. The parish where the rector resided was four miles from Trevor farm, and the desolate prospect that at first presented itself to the imagination of my mother had induced her to write, with no little contrition, and all the pathos she could collect, to implore pardon for her offence. But in vain. Her humiliation, intreaties, and dread of want, excited sensations of triumph and obduracy, but not of compassion, in the bosom of the man of God. The rector was implacable: his pride was wounded, his prejudices insulted, and his anger rouzed. He had, beside, his own money in his own pocket, and there he was willing it should remain. Now we all know that pride, prejudice, anger, and avarice, are four of the most perverse imps the dramatis personae of the passions can afford. The irreparable wrong done to the family dignity, and the proper vengeance it became parental authority to inflict, on such presumption as my father had been guilty of, and such derogatory meanness as that of my mother, were inexhaustible themes.

The severity of her father rendered the fortunate efforts of her husband tenfold delightful. They mutually exulted in that futurity that should enable them to set the unkind rector at defiance; and Hugh often boasted he would prove, though but a farmer, that the blood in his veins was as warm, and perhaps as pure, as that of any proud parson's in the kingdom.

These were pleasant and flourishing but fleeting days. My father, when he went to the fair to purchase his team, happened to see a fine hunter on sale. It was a beautiful beast. Who could forbear to prefer him and his noble form, high blood, and spirited action, to the slouching dull and clumsy cart-horse? Hugh Trevor was not a man so deficient in taste; he therefore, instead of a team of five, brought home three horses for the plough, and this high bred hunter for his pleasure. My mother herself, when she saw the animal, and heard her husband's encomiums, could not but admire; nay she had even some inclination to approve: especially when she listened to what follows.

'My dear Jane,' said my father to her, after alighting from the back of his hunter, which he had walked, trotted, and galloped, to convince her how perfect he was in all his paces, My dear Jane, we have an excellent farm; the land is in good condition, the fences sound, and the soil rich: no man in this county understands seeding, cropping, and marketing better than I do: we shall improve our stock and double our rent (it was a hundred and fifty pounds per annum) the first year. I shall soon meet with a smart nag, fit for the side saddle, and shall easily make you a good horse woman; and then, when the seed is in the ground, we may be allowed to take a little pleasure. Perhaps we may ride by the rector's door, and if he should not ask us in we will not break our hearts. Who knows but, in time, we may have cause to be as purse proud as himself?

My father, as it appears, was sanguine, high spirited, and not without resentment. My mother, though her fancy was not quite so active, did not think his reasoning much amiss; and recollected the jaunts they were to take between seed time and harvest with complacency.

CHAP. II.

PROGRESS OF MY EDUCATION, AND CONJECTURES ON ITS CONSEQUENCES.

BOLD in his projects, lucky in his bargains, and fertile in resources, every thing, for a time, which my father undertook, seemed to prosper.

In the interim, I grew apace; and, according to the old phrase, was my father's pride and my mother's joy. His free humour, and the delight she took in exhibiting her boy, had occasioned me, in early infancy, to be handed from arm to arm, and so familiarized to a variety of countenances, as soon to be entirely exempted from the usual fears of childen. My father's bargains and sales brought me continually acquainted with strange faces. He was vain of me, fond of having me with him, and, as he called it, of case-hardening me. I became full of prattle, inquisitive, had an incessant flow of spirits, and often put interrogatories so whimsical, or so uncommon, as to make myself remarkably amusing.

From inclination, indeed, and not from plan, my father took some trouble in my education; which I suspect was productive of unforeseen effects. He played with me as a cat does with her kitten, and taught me all the tricks of which he was master. They were chiefly indeed of a bodily kind; such as holding me over his head erect on the palm of his hand; putting me into various postures; making me tumble in as many ways as he could devise; pitching me on the back of his hunter, and accustoming me to sit on full trot; with abundance of other antics, at which he found me apt; yet, being accompanied with laughter and shouts, and now and then a hard knock, they tended, or I am mistaken, not only to give bodily activity, but to awaken some of the powers of mind; among which one of the foremost is fortitude. Insomuch that, since I have had the honour to become a philosopher, I have begun to doubt whether, hereafter, when the world shall be wiser, the art of tumbling may not possibly supercede the art of dancing? But this by the by.

Nor was my mother, on her part, altogether deficient in activity. Exclusive of providing me with a sister, who from some accident or other was but a puling, wrangling, rickety young lady, she initiated me in the mysteries and pleasures of the alphabet. The rector had taken some trouble to make his daughters good English scholars; and my mother, though she had retained much of his solemn song, could not only read currently, and articulate clearly, but made some attempts to understand what she read. It must be acknowledged, however, that her efforts were but feeble.

I know not how it happened that I very early became in love with this divine art, but such was the fact. I could spell boldly at two years and a half old, and in less than six months more could read the collects, epistles, and gospels, without being stopped by one word in twenty. Soon afterward I attacked the Bible, and in a few months the tenth chapter of Nehemiah himself could not terrify me. My father bought me many tragical ditties; such as Chevy Chace, the Children in the Wood, Death and the Lady, and, which were infinitely the richest gems in my library, Robin Hood's Garland, and the History of Jack the Giant-killer. To render these treasures more captivating, observing the delight it gave me, he used sometimes to sing the adventures of Robin Hood with me; whether to the right tunes, or to music of his own composing, is more than I know.

By accidents of this and the like kind, I became so much my father's play-thing, and toy, that, his affairs then going on prosperously, he put me in breeches before I was four years old, bought me a pony, which he christened Gray Bob, buckled me to the saddle for safety, and with a leading rein used frequently to take me with him to markets, fairs, and races.

But, before I proceed to relate more of my infantine adventures, it will be necessary to introduce a kinsman of mine to the reader's acquaintance; of whom, though the alliance were now of some standing, he has yet never heard.

CHAP. III.

RATIONAL COURTSHIP, AND PRUDENT VIEWS OF WIDOWED LOVERS: A STRANGE DOUBT HINTED: THE HUSBAND'S CODE: LAWS ARE QUICKLY PRESCRIBED, AND YES IS EASILY SAID.

I HAVE already mentioned my aunt, her imprudent first marriage, the rector's resentment, who used to pronounce himself the most unfortunate of men, in undutiful children, and her irksome dependence on his bounty. With this aunt Mr. Elford, a man of much worth, considerable knowledge, and great integrity of intention, became acquainted, and by a variety of motives was prompted to pay her his addresses.

No people are so certain of the happiness of a state of wedlock as a couple courting. Some difference however must be made, between lovers who have never married, and lovers who, having made the experiment, find it possible that a drop of gall may now and then embitter the cup of honey. My aunt's first husband had been a man of an easy disposition, and readily swayed to good or ill. She had seldom suffered contradiction from him, or heard reproach. A kind of good humoured indolence had accustomed him rather to ward off accusation with banter, or to be silent under it, than to contend. His extravagance had obliged her to study the strictest economy; she, therefore, was the ostensible person; she regulated, she corrected, she complained. She had a tincture of the rector in her composition, and her husband's follies afforded sufficient opportunities for the exercise of her office.

After his death, which happened early, the wrecks of his originally small fortune, scarcely afforded her subistence for a year. By many humble but grating concessions on her part, and no less proud upbraidings on the part of her father, she was first allowed a trifling annuity, almost too scanty to afford the means of life, and, as it were in resentment to the unpardonable conduct of my mother, was afterward permitted to return to the parsonage house.

The state of subjection in which she was kept, the dissatisfaction this evidently created, the gloom that was visible in her countenance, and that seemed to oppress her heart, added to a disconsolate and habitual taciturnity, soon occasioned Mr. Elford to consider her with compassion: and the very question—can I not afford her relief? gave birth to ideas of a still more tender nature.

These were seconded by a retrospect to his own situation. He had lost a beloved wife, who had left him an infant daughter, in whose future felicity he was strongly interested. He had often considered the subject of education, and had become the determined enemy of boarding-schools, where every thing is taught and nothing understood; where airs, graces, mouth primming, shoulder-setting and elbow-holding are studied, and affectation, formality, hypocrisy, and pride are acquired; and where children the most promising are presently transformed into vain, pert misses; who imagine that to perk up their heads, turn out their toes, and exhibit the ostentatious opulence of their relations, in a tawdry ball night dress, is the summit of perfection.

Determined that his child should be sent to no such academy, he considered a second marriage as necessary. Though an excellent economist, he was utterly a stranger to avarice. My aunt was neither rich, nor handsome, nor young; being, according to the rector's account, on the debtor side of his books, of an adust complection, atrabilarious in look and temper, thirty-four, and two years older than Mr. Elford. But he imagined he could make her happy; or at least could relieve her from a state little less than miserable. He likewise supposed that she was well fitted to promote plans which he held to be wise, Errors in moral calculations frequently escape undetected, even by the most accurate.

But, as he was very sincere and honest in his intentions, he thought proper, while paying his court to her, to explain what his expectations were, and the reasons on which they were grounded. His system was, there must be government; and, if government, there must be governors. This by the by I believe to be a radical mistake in politics; though I likewise believe there is not one man in fifty thousand who would not scoff at me for the supposition. Proceeding in his hypothesis, he concluded that the strongest understanding had a prescriptive and inherent right to govern; and with great candour, thus laying down the law to my aunt, he undisguisedly avowed a conviction that his understanding was the strongest, and that to govern would be his inherent right.

His words were so powerful, his arguments so excellent, his statement of them so clear, and all his deductions so indubitable, that my aunt had not the least objection to offer. "That must be allowed—that cannot be denied— nothing can be more reasonable"—were her continual answers.

The consequence of all this was a marriage: and my aunt having been noted for her prudence, during the life of her first husband, (though not indeed in having made him her husband) and Mr. Elford's character, for propriety, rectitude and good intention, being still more permanently established, there was not the least doubt entertained, especially by the parties, but that this would be a happy match.

Having thus brought the reader and Mr. Elford together, I must now proceed to relate the manner in which I myself and my good uncle first became acquainted.

CHAP. IV.

MY CURIOSITY LEADS ME INTO DANGER, BUT INTRODUCES ME TO A FRIEND, WHO DISCOVERS THAT HE IS MY UNCLE.

IN the month of August, and the city of *****, a fair is annually held, in which, during those halcyon days of prosperity, my father was an active trafficker. Thither the neighbouring gentry, yeomanry, and dealers in general, repaired, as the best mart in the county, at which to expend their money. It was fifteen miles from Trevor farm.

Curiosity is an incessant impulse to youth. I intreated to go, and my petition was favourably received. When we were there, in consequence of some bargain or sale, it happened that my father had occasion to ride, with a farmer, to a place at some distance from the fair, and in the interim to leave me in the care of the bar-maid of the inn, at which we had put up.

He had not been long gone before I, eager to see what could be seen, broke loose from my keeper, who was too busy to pay much attention to me, and strolled into the throng. I wandered about, without any suspicion of danger, from place to place, I know not how long, to drink in all the knowledge that could enter at my eyes.

How I came there I cannot tell, but at last it appears I had rambled into a coffee-house, put questions to the guests, who found amusement in the novelty of my undaunted air, appearance, and prattle, and, having taken up a newspaper and begun to display my talent, was placed upon a table to read it aloud to the company.

The astonished farmers could scarcely believe their ears, so much was I, a four-year-old child, their superior in learning. Some of them were not certain that I was not an imp of Satan, so utterly did my performance exceed credibility. My beauty too at this age was uncommon; my limbs were straight and strong, my cheeks of the purest red and white, and my full flaxen hair hung in short ringlets down my neck. The mistress and bar-maid kissed me, the men gave me money, and they all eagerly enquired who I was, where I was going, and how I had come there.

In the height of this scene it happened that Mr. Elford came in, who, though two years married to my aunt, till that time had never seen me. Though his understanding prevented any stupid wonder, yet he felt uncommon emotion for a child, unknown to every body, yet happy and fearless, and so attractive in manners, form, and intelligence. He asked, what was my name? I answered, little Hugh. From whence did I come? From home— Who brought me? Gray Bob.—Where was I going? To see the fair.

In the midst of these interrogatories, a beggar, with a child at her back, and another that she led, came into the coffee-room. In one hand I had a cake, given me by one of the company, which I had begun to eat; and in the other the money, that the kindness and amazement of my auditors had forced upon me. The woman intreated piteously for relief; and the landlord, angry that his guests should be disturbed, advanced to turn her out. She again intreated with great earnestness for charity. That she inspired me with some share of pity, seems certain for I held out my hand with the money to her, and said—Here!

Pleased with my promptness, Mr. Elford bade her take it, and she obeyed. The child at her back, seeing my cake, stretched out its arm; I understood its language, and was going to give it the cake, but checked myself, and said, No; you must not have all; your brother must have a bit; and broke it between them. Seized with one of those emotions, to which some few people are subject, Mr. Elford snatched me in his arms, kissed me, and exclaimed—My good boy, I prophecy thou wilt one day be a brave fellow!

Just as this was passing, the city bellman took his stand opposite the coffee-house door; and, with his O yes, gave notice that I was lost; concluding with a description of my age, dress, name, and place of abode.

Mr. Elford immediately conjectured his business, went to listen, was struck when he heard the particulars, and hastily returned to ask me if my name was Hugh Trevor? I answered, yes; little Hugh. He instantly ran after the bellman, told him the boy was found, and I was conducted by Mr. Elford and the bellman, with a crowd in their retinue, back to my terrified father; between whom and my uncle an acquaintance from this time commenced.

CHAP. V.

BENEVOLENT STRATAGEM OF MY UNCLE DEFEATED BY THE UNLUCKY AND FOOLISH TRIUMPH OF MY FATHER: THE ANGER AND OATH OF THE RECTOR.

MR. ELFORD cultivated a small estate of his own, lying about ten miles from Trevor farm, and beyond that village of which my grandfather was the spiritual guide. The daughter for whose sake he had first been prompted to marry again was dead, and this perhaps was one cause that strengthened his affection for me. He frequently rode over to visit us, made himself my play-mate and favourite, encouraged a greater degree of intimacy between the sisters, who were not too cordially inclined toward each other, and soon obtained permission to take me home with him for a fortnight. The disposition he shewed to aid my father, and the possibility that I might one day be his heir, readily induced my parents to comply.

Mr. Elford, as his history will shew, was perhaps liable to greater mistakes than might have been expected from a man of so much understanding, ardour, and goodness of intention; but, though like other men occasionally blind to his own errors, he could not but feel pain at the obduracy of the rector's conduct toward my mother. For this reason, on my first visit to his house, he concerted a plan by which he hoped to effect a reconciliation. From the incidents that occurred, I think it probable that he would have accomplished his purpose, had it not been for a trick that my father played, by which this well meant scheme was rendered abortive.

Squire Mowbray, the lord of the manor in which lay the village where my grandfather lived, kept his coach and his post chariot. The rector, who had a secret enmity to him, or rather to that influence by which his own power was diminished, kept his coach and his post chariot too, lest he should openly avow inferiority, and his dignity be called in question. To add to these honours, he was drawn by a pair of bays.

It happened that one of these animals became unfit for service, was sold, and another was wanting as his successor. A neighbouring horse-breeder had one that was a good match, and for which the rector had bidden money, but not enough. My father, in the mean time, had purchased this and other horses of the owner; and the rector, when it was too late, sent to offer the man his own price.

The breeder made application to my father to have the horse again, with an allowance of profit; to which he consented, till he was accidentally told for whom the horse was designed. Flushed with temporary success and fallacious hopes, Hugh was happy to find an opportunity of shewing that he could resent as well as the rector, and exultingly swore he should not have the horse, if he would purchase him at his weight in gold.

The message, with a due increase of insulting aggravation, was conveyed to the divine; who was so exasperated by this audacious act of insolence and gratuitous rebellion, that he went down on his knees, and took a solemn oath never to forget or forgive the injury.

Whether this became an apostle of peace, or whether divines are all and unexceptionably apostles of peace, are questions which I do not here pretend to analyze.

Ignorant of this event, and glowing with the desire of affording me a grandfather's protection, Mr. Elford pursued his little plot. The rector had always wished for a male heir, the offspring of his own loins; but in this he had not been indulged, by those powers that regulate such matters. A son of his own being therefore past hope, Mr. Elford imagined he might perhaps find consolation in the succedaneum of a grandson.

Accordingly, a few days after my arrival at his house, where I was to stay a fortnight, he invited the rector, who had never yet seen me, to dinner. Without telling him who I was, my uncle made me so diverting, by the art with which he knew how to manage me, that the old gentleman, quite surprized, declared I was a very extraordinary child.

So fearless and free was my behaviour, that the rector and I presently became familiar. I shook hands with him, sat on his knee, felt in his pocket, gave him the history of Gray Bob, and asked for a penny to buy me a whip. My request being granted, I wanted immediately to have a horse saddled, that I might ride to market, and make my purchase; and the good humour with which I received the information, that this was a favour not to be obtained, further gained on the old theologian's heart. I asked if he had a horse. He answered, yes, he had many horses; and that if I would go home with him, he would let me ride them all. Come, let us go, said I, taking hold of his hand, and pulling him.

Mr. Elford, waiting for the proper moment, and interrupting me, asked my grandfather—If you, Sir, had but such a little fellow of your own, what would you do with him?—Do! exclaimed the rector: I would make a man of him. Oh that he had been mine twenty years ago!—And why not, O that he were mine now? answered Mr. Elford—I could be well contented that he were. As he said this, the rector, strange to tell, sighed—Your wishes then are gratified, continued Mr. Elford: he is your own.—"How?"—"Your grandson!"

The reverend pastor was taken by surprise. Certain associations had been set afloat, and the desire of realizing the vision had for a moment obliterated the recollection of revenge. Go, Hugh, said Mr. Elford, and kiss your grandfather. Without asking any questions, or shewing the least token of reluctance, I went up to him, as I was bidden, to give the kiss; but my good-humoured face, stretched out arms, and projecting chin, were presented in vain: the words Hugh and grandfather had conjured up the fiend, and the rector sat motionless.

Not accustomed to meet and therefore not expecting repulse, I climbed up his chair, stayed myself by the breast of his coat, and sat down on his knee. The recollection of his daughter's crime, his contaminated blood, and the insufferable insolence of my father, came strongly upon him. He scowled at me, seized me by the arms, flung me from him with something like violence, and walked hastily out of the house.

The tide of passion ran so high that he would not stay to dine, but departed, muttering anger at the conduct of Mr. Elford, and repeating asseverations of eternal resentment and maledictions against undutiful children.

Mr. Elford felt an emotion something stronger than grief, to see a pastor of the flock of Christ thus cherish the spirit of persecution. On me the scene made but little impression. I had no apprehension that the day was coming, when this inflexible guide of Christians would find his prayers effectual, and his prophecies of vengeance fulfilled. How could I know that there was so hateful a vice as malignity? The holy seer did not indeed indulge his wrath quite so far as Elisha, at least not openly; he did not curse me in the name of the Lord, nor did she-bears come out of the wood to devour me; but I soon enough had my share of misfortune. Preachers of peace, it appears, were always irritable: but to do them justice, I believe they are something less so now than they were of old.

CHAP. VI.

MY DIFFERENT PRECEPTORS AND EARLY PROPENSITIES: I RIDE TO HUNT WITH MY FATHER, WHICH IS PRODUCTIVE OF A STRANGE AND TERRIBLE ADVENTURE.

MY father's affairs still continued to wear the appearance of success, and by the aid of Mr. Elford, he extended his speculations. For some few years my time passed merrily away. Under the tuition of my father, I gained health, strength, and intrepidity; and was taught to sip ale, eat hung beef, ride like a hero, climb trees, run, jump, and swim; that, as he said, I might face the world without fear. I grew strong of muscle, and my thews and sinews became alert and elastic in the execution of their office.

To my uncle I was indebted for hints and notions of a more refined and elevated nature. By familiar instances, he endeavoured to make me distinguish between resisting wrongs and revenging them; and to feel the pleasure, not only of aiding the weak, but of pardoning the vanquished.

From the books which I found in his house, I likewise early acquired a religious propensity, which was encouraged by my aunt with all her power, and seconded by my mother. Their education, and the dogmas they had heard from the rector, had given them very high notions of the dignity of the clerical character; in the superior presence of which, temporal things, laymen, and civil magistracy itself, sunk into insignificance. The perusal of Fox's Book of Martyrs, of which I was so fond that I would sit with my aunt for hours, before I was eight years old, and read it to her, aided their efforts: and this childhood bias, as will be seen, greatly influenced my first pursuits in life. We are all the creatures of the necessities under which we exist. The history of man is but the history of these necessities, and of the impulse, emotion, or mind, by them begotten. Of the incidents of my childhood, that which made the deepest impression upon me I am now going to relate.

The daring Hugh, my father, who feared no colours, had long been accustomed, whenever he could find time, and often indeed when he could not, to follow the fox hounds, and hunt with his landlord, the Squire himself. Among his other bargains, he had lately bought one of the Squire's brood mares, Bay Meg, that had been sold because she had twice cast her foal. On the eve of my ninth returning birth-day, being in a gay humour (he was seldom sad) he said to me, I shall go out to-morrow morning with Squire Mowbray's hounds, Hugh; will you get up and go with me? My heart bounded at the proposal. Yes, said I. Lord, husband, exclaimed my mother, would you break the child's neck. There is no fear, retorted I. Well said Hugh, continued my father; you shall ride Bay Meg; you are but a feather, she will carry you with ease, and will not run away with you. Never fear that, replied I, stoutly. My mother at first made some opposition, but my father laughed, and I coaxed, intreated, and teazed, till she complied; for this was by no means the first scene of the kind.

I went to bed with an overjoyed heart, and a head so full of the morrow that I was up dressed and ready the first in the house. The horses were brought out, my father and I mounted, we soon came up with the sportsmen, and away we went in quest of a fox.

We were at first unlucky, and it was late in the day before Reynard was found; but about noon the hounds opened, he started in view, and the sport began.

The chace happened to be long, heavy, and continued for many miles. My father was an eager sportsman. He valued himself both upon his hunter and his horsemanship; and who should be first in at the death was an honour that he would contend with the keenest sportsman in the kingdom, though it were the Squire himself. The running was so severe that Bay Meg became willing to lag. He looked behind, called after me to push on, and I obeyed, and laid on her with whip and heel, as lustily as I could. My father, anxious to keep sight of me yet not lose the hounds, pulled in a little, and the hunted animal, in hopes of finding cover, made toward a wood. Being prevented from entering it, he skirted along its sides, and turning the corner, the hindmost sportsmen followed by a short cut through the wood.

Keeping my eye on my father, I likewise struck into the wood, but, taking a wrong direction, was presently entangled among the trees and brambles, and entirely at a loss. I afterward learned that my father, having lost sight of me for some minutes, stopped, hoping I should come up; and then rode back to seek me, while I was spurring forward in a contrary line.

After many efforts, stoppages, and windings, I at last made my way through the wood, and came to the entrance of an extensive heath. The hounds, though at a great distance, were still in hearing, and Bay Meg, accustomed to the sport, erected her ears and listened after them with great attention. For some time longer she obeyed the whip, and increased her gallop, evidently with a desire to come up with them; but after a while, finding they were out of hearing, she grew sulky, slackened her pace, tired, and at last fairly stood still. I had been so much used to horses that, perceiving her humour, I had the sagacity to turn her head homeward, and she then went on again, though with a sullen and sluggish pace.

On looking round however, and considering, my alarm began. I was in the middle of an extensive heath, or moor, with no living creature house or object in sight, except here and there a scattered shrub and a few sheep. It was winter, and the day was far advanced: add to this the wind had risen, and when I turned about, was in my face, and blew a sharp sleet which then began to fall full in my eyes, half blinded me and the mare, and offended her nostrils so much that she once more wheeled about, and refused to proceed either one way or the other.

Not yet quite daunted, while I was making every effort to bring her round, a gust of wind blew off my hat. Forgetting that Bay Meg was tall and I short, and that there was neither gate nor mounting stone to be seen, I alighted to recover my hat. Being down, to get up again was impossible; my foot could not reach the stirrup.

The lowering sky, the approach of darkness, and the utter desert in which I found myself at length conjured up the full distress of the scene, which seized upon my imagination, and I burst into tears.

I continued sobbing, crying, and tugging at Bay Meg, till night had fairly overtaken us. At last I found myself beside some white railing, which was the boundary of a race course within the distance. This at first seemed to promise me relief: with great difficulty I coaxed Bay Meg up to it, climbed upon the railing, and hoped once more to mount. But in vain; the perverse animal set her face to me, nor could any language I was master of prevail on her to approach sideways; and if I lifted my whip, she did but run backward and pull me down.

This contest continued I know not how long, till quite hopeless I gave it up, and again proceeded to lead her, not knowing where or in what direction I was going. After a time the moon appeared, and a very indifferent afternoon was succeeded by a fine night. I continued sobbing, but still proceeded, as fast as I could prevail on Bay Meg to follow me, till propitious fortune brought me to a road, where the wheels had cut deep ruts, and the tread of horses had left the ridges high. Here I once again essayed to mount, and by the help of the stirrup succeeded!

Still I knew not where I was, nor what to do; except that my only chance was to go on.

I had not proceeded far before the traces of road began to diminish, and I struck into another path that seemed more beaten. This gradually disappeared, and I soon found myself on the level green-sward, without any marks of footting for my guide. To relieve this new distress I turned to the right, hoping again to recover the track I had lost; instead of which, after riding on I know not how far, I found the heath begin to grow marshy. Again I turned, but so unfortunately that every step the mare set sunk her deeper and deeper in a bog, till at last she could not drag herself out. My danger was extreme; but I rightly conjectured the bog would support me singly, better than it would me and the mare: I therefore jumped off, kept hold of the bridle, which I threw over her head, and by shifting my ground prevented myself from sinking very deep, while I continued my endeavours to relieve the mare. She made a lucky plunge, and I, turning her head in a different direction as much as possible, found myself in part released from this danger: though I was obliged to proceed every step with the utmost precaution.

Once more dismounted, wearied, and despairing, I had no resource but to wander I knew not whither, or lie down perishing with cold on a damp moor, while a severe frost was setting in. Great as my distress was, I had too much courage to sink under it, and I went on, giving some relief to my affliction by sobs and tears.

These various circumstances continued till the night began to be far advanced; but after two or three hours of most tedious and weary wandering I again came to a rising ground, by the help of which with great efforts I once more contrived to mount. I was no sooner in the saddle than I thought I saw a light at a distance, which sometimes seemed to glimmer and as often disappeared. Toward this however I determined to direct my course, and proceeded losing and recovering it till I could catch sight of it no more.

Continuing in the same direction for some time, I came to a barn. Benumbed, fatigued, and ready as I was to drop from the saddle, I entered it as joyfully as a shipwrecked sailor climbs a barren rock. I scarcely could dismount, and it was with great difficulty I could unbuckle and take off the bridle of Bay Meg: but my hands were so frost bitten and my perseverance so exhausted, that the saddle was beyond my ability. I therefore shut the door, and left her to feed on what she could find; while I went and laid myself down among some trusses of straw, that were heaped on one side.

The pain of my thawing hands would not immediately suffer me to go to sleep, and, just as it was beginning to decrease and I to slumber, the door opened and a woman came in. My fears were again alarmed, for as I listened I heard her weep bitterly. In no long time afterward a man leaned forward, through the door, and said—"Mary! Art thou there?" —To which she replied with a sob— "Yea, Tummas; I be here."

My half frozen blood and my fears again afloat made me tremble through every limb; and there was something in the grief of the woman, and particularly in the voice of the man, which had no tendency to calm my agitation. I could see distinctly, for the moon shone full in at the door. He entered the barn, they sat down together, and after some trifling questions I heard the following dialogue.

"And so, Mary, thou say'st thou beest with child?"

"Yea, Tummas, that I too surely be; the more is my hard hap."

"And what dost thou mean to do?"

"Nay, Tummas, what doon you mean to do?"

"No matter for that—Thou threatest me, last night, that thou wouldst swear thy bastard to me."

"For shame, for shame, Tummas, to talk o'that'n! If it mun be a bastard, thou well knowest it is a bastard of thy own begetting"

"I know better."

"Oh Christ! Tummas: canst thou look in my face and tell me that?"

"Yea, I can."

"Thou art a base false man, Tummas!"

"Don't call names."

"Thou knowest thou art. What canst thou hope for, after swearing so wickedly as thou didst to be true to me and marry me, but that the devil should come for thee alive?"

"No matter for that. If I must go to the devil, it shall not be for nothing. But mayhap thou hadst a better a kept a good tongue in thy head."

"Thou hadst a better a kept an honest one in thine, Tummas."

"I'll make thee repent taunting me, as thou hast done, afore folks; and threaping and threating to lay thy bastard at my door."

"Do thy worst! Thou hast brought me to shame and misery, and hast sworn thyself to the bottomless pit: what canst thou do more?"

"Thou shalt see."

As he said this, he deliberately drew a knife from his pocket, and began to whet it upon his shoe—I was breathless: my hair stoodan end—The woman exclaimed

"Jesus God! Tummas; What dost thou mean?"

"Say thy prayers!"

"Merciful Saviour! Why, thou wilt not murder me, Tummas?"

"Thou shalt never go alive out of this place."

"Christ have mercy upon my sinful soul!"

"I'll do thy business."

"For the gracious love of the merciful heaven, Tummas, bethink thyself!"

"I'll teach thee to swear thy ugly bastard brat to me!"

"I wunnot, Tummas; I wunnot! For Christ Jesus sake bethink thyself! Dunnot murder me, Tummas! Oh, dunnot murder me! I'll never trouble thee, Tummas, while I have breath; I'll never trouble thee! Indeed, indeed, I wunnot!"

"I know thee better: tomorrow thou would'st tell all; this and all."

"Never, Tummas: as God shall pardon my sins, never, never, never!"

The poor creature screamed with agony, while the determined fellow kept whetting his knife. At last she made a sudden spring and endeavoured to seize his arm; but, missing her aim, he immediately struck her with his fist and began to stab her.

Unable to contain myself, I shrieked with no less horror and vociferation than the poor mangled creature. The mare herself took fright, and sprang, with the snorting of terror and clattering of hoofs, with her shoulder against the door, endeavouring to get out.

This unexpected noise, aiding his guilt, inspired the murdering wretch with instantaneous dread, and he immediately took to flight; leaving the woman weltering in her blood, groaning, and as I supposed expiring.

Impelled by my fears and the horror of the scene, I had no longer any feeling of cold, or sense of debility. I ran to the door, shut it, and finding a fork that stood beside it made as good a cross bar-fastening as I was able. I then resolutely set my own shoulder to it, and there remained, I know not how long, in momentary dread the murderer would return. The woman's groans seemed to diminish, as if she were dying; and I durst neither stir nor speak; for I feared to do any thing but listen.

The energy of my terror was so great that it was very very long before I was weary enough of my situation to be obliged to move. Fatigue, and a dead silence without, at length however induced me first to change my position, and after a time, gradually and with great caution, to open the door and look out. Neither hearing nor seeing any thing, I waited awhile, and then ventured so far as to walk round the barn; though in the utmost trepidation, and possessed by the most horrid fears, which were increased by a great increase of darkness; the moon being then either descending or hidden behind the clouds.

Having made no discoveries, except that every thing was quiet, I once more entered the barn, where all was still as death. The woman had ceased to groan; nor could I, though I listened with the most solicitous attention, hear her breathe. Horror returned in all its force, and I stood immoveable, unknowing what to resolve on or what to attempt. At length I took courage and exclaimed, "In the name of God, if you are alive, speak!"

The very sound of my own voice inspired unutterable terror; which was augmented by a heavy and long confined groan, proceeding from the woman. She had retained her breath, fearing the return of the assassin. The answer that followed her groan was, "If you are a Christian soul, get me some help." I told her I was lost, benighted, and did not know where to go for any. She replied there was a town, not half a mile distant, at the back of the barn; and named the very place at which my aunt and uncle Elford lived.

As soon as surprise and joy would permit, I asked if she knew Mr. Elford. Her answer was, "I am his servant; and this is his barn."

Various recollections immediately crouded upon me, and the scene and the voice of poor Mary, to which a moment before I had been so utter a stranger, became familiar to me. It is I, Mary; little Hugh, said I. Don't you know me? A dismal Oh! excited no doubt by the most painful associations, was her answer. I desired her to be quiet and patient, while I ran for aid; assuring her I would soon be back, for that I now knew where I was, and was perfectly acquainted with the road.

Accordingly away I ran, with all the speed I had, to my uncle's house; where, when I arrived, I knocked at the door, pelted the window, and called as vociferously as I could for them to rise. The house-dog barked violently, and my uncle was soon at the window, with my aunt at his back, demanding with surprise and dissatisfaction who I was, and what I wanted? I exclaimed, "Come down, uncle! A man has been murdering your maid Mary! She will be dead if you do not make haste!" "Good God!" cried my aunt, pressing forward; "Child! Hugh Trevor! Nephew ! Is it you?" "Yes, yes, aunt," answered I: "make haste and try to save the poor creature's life!"

The astonishment excited by such a messenger, bringing such a message, and at such an hour, may well be imagined. Master, mistress, and servants, were immediately in motion, and the doors opened. Question succeeded question; exclamations were incessant; and my answers quickly communicated much of the terror I myself had felt.

Regulating his proceedings according to my account, Mr. Elford dispatched a servant to the surgeon; and, having prepared a hurdle by way of litter, went with me and two of his men to the barn.

My aunt was very loath I should return; but my spirits, by the various incidents of the night, were much too active to suffer me to feel either hunger, weariness, or want of sleep; and Mr. Elford recollected I might be useful, in preventing the terrors of poor Mary at our approach; for which reason he suffered me to run before, and inform her that help was coming.

When I came to the barn, the moment I set my foot over the threshold, my terrors of murder and of her having expired all returned. After a short pause, I called with a trembling voice, "Mary! Are you alive?" and my heart bounded with joy to hear her, though dolefully, answer, "yea."

Mr. Elford and his attendants soon came up; and the remainder of the story of poor Mary was, that, being removed and put to bed, her wounds though deep and dangerous were found not to be mortal; that she recovered in a few weeks, and by the influence of Mr. Elford was retained in my aunt's service; to the great scandal of the place, where it was affirmed that such hussies and their bastards ought to be whipped from parish to parish, and so, as I suppose, whipped out of the world; that in two months time she was delivered of a fine boy, whom, when my uncle left the country, she maintained by her own hard earnings; and that in the extremity of her distress, when she thought herself at the point of death, she obstinately refused to declare who was her intended murderer; and though, by his having been known to be her sweetheart, and his flight from the country where he never more appeared, people were sufficiently convinced who the man was, yet her pertinacious theme was—she would never be his accuser: if God could pardon him, she could.

CHAP. VII.

MISTAKES AND FAMILY QUARRELS OF MR. AND MRS. ELFORD: HIS DEPARTURE, AND EXILE: WITH THE LETTERS HE WROTE.

AND now the period approached when the pleasures of the days of childhood were to terminate, and when I was to experience abundance of those rude disasters under which the poor, the friendless, and the fatherless, groan.

The first stroke which the malice of fortune aimed at me was the voluntary banishment of my uncle. Though I have forborne to interrupt my narrative by a recapitulation of the unhappy bickerings that took place between Mr. Elford and my aunt, soon after their marriage, yet these bickerings were very frequent, very bitter, and at last very fatal. Instead of the happiness which they and every body had thought so certain, they were completely wretched.

My youth had not prevented me lately from remarking, when at their house, the steady and severe silence which Mr. Elford endeavoured to preserve, and the fixed dissatisfaction and gloom of my aunt. Notwithstanding the efforts they made, especially Mr. Elford, not to suffer their unhappiness to extend beyond themselves, it became frequently painful, even for me, to be in their company. He indeed was often in part successful, in these efforts; but she seldom, or never.

Their mutual discontent was the more easily increased to misery, because it happened between people who each had the character of prudent; and whose partiality individually acquitted them of that disorder, which the want of good temper alone had produced.

In making an estimate of the probable conveniences and inconveniences, agreements and disagreements, that might happen between them, they had reciprocally been deceived.

Mr. Elford had endeavoured to provide against this, by a plain declaration of his sentiments and expectations; which Mrs. Elford had too inconsiderately concluded she should continue to think rational and just. She imagined there was no fear of violent quarrels, between a man of so much understanding as Mr. Elford and a woman so disposed to listen to reason as herself. She was ignorant of the power of habit over her temper. The rector had taught her pride, marriage had taught her misfortune, and pride and misfortune had made her fretful, melancholy and moody. She had suffered no opposition from her first husband; her will had been his law; and she knew not, till she had made the trial, how difficult it is to concede with a good grace. The least thing that offended her threw her into tears. The passions of Mr. Elford and my aunt were mutually too much inflamed for either of them to draw equitable and wise conclusions, and tears he held to be a false, insulting, and odious mode of proclaiming him a tyrant: it was to say, I dare not utter my complaints in words, but my tears I cannot restrain! Too angry to doubt of or examine his reasons, convinced of his own humanity, and his desire to see and make her happy, such an accusation he considered so violently unjust as to be unpardonable.

It must be owned, she did not confine her grief to weeping; she was often seized with fits of hysteric passion, in which the most outrageous and false accusations were indulged. To reply to them, or attempt to disprove what he knew to be so absurd, he thought derogatory to innocence; and the world half suspected him to be the tyrant he had been painted. This increased his sense of injury, and consequently did not diminish the affliction of my aunt.

Of the happiness, indeed, which was to result from this marriage, she had conceived romantic ideas; and when she found herself again involved in the cares of a family, liable to the control of a man who expected the utmost propriety and order, who looked with a strict eye over every department, and whose opinion did not always coincide with her own, she became constantly peevish, and her former gloom grew ten fold more gloomy. She pined after that connubial affection which their reciprocal conduct was calculated to destroy; and from the hasty decisions of passion convinced herself, that no part of the blame was justly her own. Mr. Elford was no less obstinate in the contrary opinion. Taking philosophy such as he found it, he like his neighbours too hastily concluded there were duties and affairs for which men were fitted, but of which women were incapable. Blending much truth with some falsehood, he thus argued:

"The leading features in the character of an amiable and good woman are mildness, complacency, and equanimity of temper. The man, if he be a provident and worthy husband, is immersed in a thousand cares: his mind is agitated, his memory loaded, and his body fatigued. He returns from the bustle of the world chagrined perhaps at disappointments, angry at indolent or perfidious people, and terrified lest his unavoidable connections with such people should make him appear to be indolent or perfidious himself. Is this a time for the wife of his bosom, his dearest most intimate friend, to add to his vexations and increase the fever of an overburthened mind, by a contumelious tongue or a discontented brow? Business, in its most prosperous state, is full of anxiety, labour, and turmoil. Oh! how dear to the memory of man is that wife who clothes her face in smiles; who uses gentle expressions, and who makes her lap soft to receive and hush his cares to rest. There is not in all nature so fascinating an object as a faithful, tender, and affectionate wife!"

Had he wished for a wife who, instead of indulging the caprice of indolence would have awakened him to energy, and have taught him to be just not captious, his desires would have been more rational: but, to a man who had formed a system of obedience to authority, and not to reason, the arguments he used were irrefragable. To a woman who imagined that obedience, in all cases, was the badge of abject slavery, they were absurd. Thus opposite in principle and in practice, their unhappy state of existence finally became so intolerable, to one of them at least, as to occasion the violent measure and the painful sensations described by Mr. Elford in the following letter.

TO MRS. ELFORD,

The bitterness of unjust reproach, the invectives of an ungoverned tongue, the rancorous accusations of a stubborn heart, these, wretched as they long have made me, to me are now no more. Forgetful man! No more? You I can forsake; but where shall I fly to rid myself of them? You have riveted them upon me, and while I have life they can never die. With you I have travelled through the vale of tears: you, like misery personified, have held the cup of sorrow; have fed me with affliction, strewed thorns beneath my feet by day, and wound adders round my pillow by night. Absence itself cannot afford a cure. Yes, reconcile it to your conscience how you may, you have given my peace a mortal wound.

You cannot forget, when I first thought of you for a wife, the plainness and sincerity with which I acted. I carefully stated that my family was reputable but not rich, and that I was a younger brother; that my wealth was not great; but that it was sufficient, with industry and the character I had established, to gratify the desires of people whose hearts were not vitiated, and whose wants were bounded. I conscientiously repeated my ideas concerning the regulations and economy of a well governed family; and of the parts which it became the husband and the wife to take. That was the time in which you ought to have made your objections: but then every thing was just, every thing was rational; and from your ready acquiescence to my proposals and the admiration with which you seemed to receive them, I had no doubt of enjoying that serene that delightful state of connubial happiness, so often desired and so seldom obtained.

On such conditions and with such views, I confidently entered with you into a partnership which unhappily cannot be dissolved. The irrevocable contract was scarcely ratified before it was violated. With a temper habitually gloomy and suspicious, and a mind incapable of bending to those inevitable little anxieties and vexations which occur in the most quiet families, you soon discovered your propensity to repel every thing that your jealous and fanciful temper deemed an infringement of your privileges.

Let your own heart testify how long and how ardently I endeavoured, by mildness and the most simple and convincing reasons, to bring you back to your duty. But in vain: causes of disagreement became so frequent, and injury succeeded injury so fast, that I was obliged to proceed to those gentle severities which are all that a husband, who preserves a proper respect for himself, can inflict. And gentle they certainly were, when compared to the contumely by which they were provoked. I forbore those tender and endearing epithets, by which former affection should be continually revived. I then avoided and indeed refused to converse with you, except in the company of a third person, or as far as necessity obliged me. Sorry am I to say that, instead of warning you to shun the rocks of mischief, my efforts did but aggravate your folly.

It is true you had your hours of contrition, in which, with tears and prayers and unbounded acknowledgments of the absurdity of your conduct, together with solemn assurances of reformation, you have for a moment recalled my lost love, and made me hope you would acquire some power over the discordant passions that devoured you. But these promises were so often repeated, and so continually forgotten, that at length they afforded neither hope nor ease: they had only been gleams of sunshine, foreboding that the tempest would soon return with increasing violence. Yes, partial as I know you, and blind to your own errors, you cannot deny that at last you approached the fury, rather than the woman.

To a man like me, of a delicate temper, quick at discovering errors and eager to redress them, even in cases where they do not personally affect myself but indefatigable where they do, this eternal discord, these quarrels and despicable brawls are become insupportable. I have endured the torture seven miserable years, and surely that is no slight trial: surely that is sufficient to prove I have not wanted patience or fortitude. To be a good husband and a provident father, and to protect those that depend on me from injury and want, are qualities which I believe the whole world will allow me, you alone excepted. You upbraid me with faults; you accuse me of crimes; you proclaim me a tyrant. When I am gone, when your passions have subsided, and when you feel the want of me, you will be more just. You will then lament that nothing, short of this desperate proof, could convince you of the criminality of your conduct.

Where I shall seek, where find, or where endure existence, or to what hospitable or inhospitable shore I shall wander, I know not yet: I only know that in England it cannot, shall not be. We have lived long enough in misery; which, everlastingly to avoid, seas or death shall everlastingly divide us.

W. ELFORD.

This letter, although it contained many marks of that impatience which had increased his family misfortunes, could only have been written by a man of virtue, whose very austerity had in it a preponderance of benevolent intention. Such was my uncle; whose memory, though but a child, I often had occasion to regret.

By various plausible pretexts, with the hope of forwarding a fortune that was to descend to me, Mr. Elford had been prevailed on to lend my father several sums of money, to the amount of seven hundred pounds. My uncle too had found other occasions for the exercise of his humanity. His property had been hastily sold, and therefore disadvantageously, so that the sum with which he went to seek his fortune on foreign shores was but small. He was enough acquainted with my father's affairs to know that of the money lent to him there was little hope.

To me he wrote a letter which will sufficiently shew how kind he would have been, had he possessed the power. It was inclosed in one to my father, with directions to suffer me to read it now, and that it should be preserved and given to me when age should have matured my undersanding. The following were its contents.

TO HUGH TREVOR.

My dear boy: young as you are, I have conceived a friendship and affection for you, which perhaps inflict as severe a pang, at the present moment, as any one of the distressing circumstances that occasion my flight. Had I wealth to leave, I would endeavour to secure you from the baneful effects of poverty; as it is, accept all that I have to give, my best wishes, my dearest love, and a little good advice. Though your understanding is greatly above your years, yet you cannot have experience and knowledge enough of sorrow to conceive what my feelings are: but if hereafter you should remember me, and if at that most serious moment when you enter on the marriage state you should wish for a friend like me to advise with, let this letter supply my place. The miseries I have endured, by my mistakes on the subject, are so strongly imprinted on my mind, that I can think of nothing else; and, inapplicable as it may seem to your present course of thought, I cannot persuade myself but that it is the most interesting of all topics, upon which I could write to you.

Of the wisdom of entering into the marriage state, and of the virtue of the institution, I have lately begun to entertain the most serious doubts. Whether they are well founded, or are the consequences of my own mistakes of conduct, I dare not at this moment determine: but, while the present forms of society exist, should you arrive at manhood the probability is that you will marry. If then you should ever think of marriage, think of it as a duty; and not merely as the means of self gratification, or the indulgence of some childish and irrational passion, which irrational people dignify with the name of love. Let the affection you conceive for woman be founded on the qualities of her mind.

But above all things first examine yourself, whether you can endure opposition without anger; and next put the woman you intend to marry to the same test; for, unless you are mutually unshaken in your resolutions on this head, if you marry you are miserable. The task of man and wife is reciprocally arduous. She should be mild, good-humoured, cheerful and tender; he cool, rational, and vigilant; without acrimony, devoid of captiousness, and free from passion. It is mutually their duty to inspect and to expostulate, but to be•are how they reprove. Where gentleness and equanimity of temper are wanting, happiness never can be obtained. Believe me, my dear boy, I have never stood so low in my own opinion as when I have caught myself betrayed into petulance, and descending to passion. The combats I have maintained to overcome this weakness are inconceivable.

Whether it be constitutional in me or habitual I cannot determine— [Had Mr. Elford been more a philosopher, he would have known that frequent anger is merely a habit.]—but I suspect that to this I chiefly owe my present misfortunes, as I am half persuaded there is no woman that may not be moulded into what form her husband pleases, provided he possess a superior understanding and an entire command of his temper. But Oh! how severe the task to preserve a perfect equality in despite of the ill humour, caprice, or injustice of a woman for whom you undergo a thousand difficulties, encounter continual labours, and undauntedly expose yourself to every fatigue and danger!—I blush to think I have sunk beneath the trial.—But we have both gone too far to recede: we have mutually said and done what never can be forgotten.

As good temper is the basis of connubial felicity, means must be taken by which it may be cultivated and preserved. From the first hour of marriage, beware of too much familiarity, and of encouraging or of taking liberties. Be as circumspect in your behaviour as if a stranger were present, and dread deviating from that respect which is due from man to woman, and from woman to man, in a single state. This does not imply coldness, or formality, but the cheerful intercourse of good sense. Behave as you would to a person from whom you are happy to receive a visit, and with whose company you are delighted. Should you indulge those ebullitions of passionate fondness which lose sight of these limits, it is impossible to foretell to what they may lead. A caress neglected, or supposed to be neglected, a kiss not returned with the like warmth, or a fond pressure not answered with equal ardour, may poison a mind which applauds itself for the delicacy of its sensations.

Do not expect to find your wife all perfection. I know the romance of lovers: they read descriptions in which the imagination has been exhausted, to depict enamoured youth superior to every terrestrial being; and they are convinced that, above all others, the object of their own particular choice has never yet been equalled. Such fanciful and silly people, when time and experience have something allayed their ardour, will often find their dainty taste offended at discovering a mole on the bosom, or a yellow shade in the neck, or any other trifling bodily blemish, which was as visible before marriage as after, had they looked with the same scrutinizing eyes. Be resolute in repelling every emotion of anger or disgust. Never permit a choleric or bitter expression to escape you; for wedded love is but too often of a tender and perishable nature, and such rude potions are its poison.

I look back at what I have been writing, and am astonished at the subject I have chosen. But the torrent of my thoughts is irresistible: they hurry me away, and persuade me that though young, it is yet possible you may hereafter remember me, and at a time when perhaps you shall have arrived at the exercise of many of those noble virtues which are now only in the bud. I have a great affection for you, my dear nephew, and should be glad that, if you then cannot think kindly, you should at least think justly; and that you should possess some faint picture of the present state of my feelings. Could you but know all the emotions of my heart, you would bear witness to its honesty; and would own that its efforts have been strenuous, unremitted, and sincere, though unfortunate.

Years pass quickly away: yet a little while and you will be an actor in this busy world, of which at present your knowledge is small. I am doomed never to see you more; but, while I have life and memory, I shall never forget you.

W. ELFORD.

CHAP, VIII.

MY FATHER BECOMES A BANKRUPT: FLIES THE COUNTRY: LISTS FOR AN EAST INDIA SOLDIER, AND DIES ON SHIP-BOARD: DISTRESS OF MY MOTHER; AND THE BEGINNING OF MY MISFORTUNES: I AM BOUND APPRENTICE: CHARACTERISTIC TRAITS OF MY MASTER: THE DREADFUL SUFFERINGS I UNDERGO; AND MY NARROW ESCAPES WITH LIFE.

YOUNG as I was, I perfectly remember that the strange departure of my uncle Elford produced a very sensible effect upon me. It may well be imagined that, when my understanding was more mature, the perusal of this affectionate letter, and the recollection of his kindness to me in my days of childhood, excited no little emotion.

As for my aunt, prepared as she had been for some violent catastrophe to their quarrelling, she was either so struck by the letter and the remembrance of past follies, or so fearful of the comments and scrutiny of the neighbourhood, that within a month after he was missing she quitted the country, and went to reside at the city of ****, where in less than a year she died. Her departure was private, and the place of her retreat was not known till her last illness; when intelligence was sent to the rector, to whom she bequeathed such property as she possessed.

The absence of my uncle contributed to hasten the approach of that cloudy reverse at which I have already hinted. For some time the ruin of my father's affairs had been prevented by the sums which his eloquence had wrung from the well-meaning Mr. Elford. Hugh was no contemptible orator on these occasions. Hope seldom forsook him, and he built so securely on what he hoped might come to pass as sometimes to assert the thing had already happened. Such convenient mistakes are daily made. If indeed the good graces of fortune would but have kept pace with his expectations, England would not have afforded a more flourishing or gallant yeoman. But, like monopolizers in general, he was apt to speculate a little too deeply. Eager to enjoy, he was impatient to obtain the means of enjoyment. So that, at one time, the turning up of the jack at all fours was to make his fortune; but how provoking! it happened to be the ten: at another it depended on a duck-wing cock, which (who could have foreseen so strange an accident?) disgraced the best feeder in the kingdom, by running away: and it more than once did not want half a neck's length of being realized by a favourite horse; yet was lost, contrary to the most accurate calculations which, as the learned in these matters affirm, had been made from Wheatherby's Racing Calendar.

Thus to repeated disappointments in his bets and his bargains, and to his neglect of his farming affairs, it was owing that, in anno domini—when I was nine years and a half old, after having expended the property with which he had been supplied, and incurred debts to the amount of little less than a thousand pounds, my father found it prudent to depart by night in the basket of the stage coach for London. And prudent it certainly was, for his effects had not only been seized in execution of a bond and judgment, but the bailiffs from all quarters were at his heels

My mother at this time was pregnant; the sister I have mentioned was dead; but I had a fine healthy brother about three years old, and it was agreed that we should follow to the great city, as soon as he had found employment; which, according to his notions, was the most easy thing imaginable.

It so happened, however, that he had not been there a full month before the trifling sum he and my mother had collected for his immediate existence was lost, by the turn of a die; contrary to his certain conviction that he had discovered, at a hazard table, the ready way to repair all past mistakes.

To send for wife and children was now out of the question. Destitute of support, without the means of obtaining another shilling, after fasting a day and a half, his courage, that is his appetite, could hold out no longer, and he enlisted for an East-India soldier; having first convinced himself, by the soundest arguments, that he should immediately be made a serjeant; which perhaps was no improbable calculation; that he should then soon get a commission, and that he should undoubtedly return a commanding officer, or general in chief, to the surprise of his friends and the utter confusion of the rector, and all those whom he accounted his persecutors.

That these great events might not actually have happened who shall pretend to say? Miracles of old were plentiful; and even in these unbelieving days strange things have come to pass. But all his unbounded hopes, many of which he had stated in his last letter to my mother, were unexpectedly subverted, by an accident to which it appears men in general are subject. He caught a fever, while the ship in which he was to be a passenger lay waiting in the Downs for a wind; and, in spite of the surgeon and his whole chest of medicines, died: of all which events there was a circumstantial account, transmitted by one of his comrades to my mother.

The ruin of prospects so fair, the desolation of a house and homeless woman, with two orphan children, and pregnant of a third, and the loss of a husband, who at the worst of times had always kept hope alive, were sufficient causes of affliction to my mother. Tears were plentifully shed, and daily and nightly wailings were indulged.

Every resource was soon exhausted, and immediate relief became necessary. To whom could she apply? To whom, but the rector? She wrote to him in terms the most moving, the most humiliating, and indeed the most abject, that her imagination could suggest. But in vain: no prayers, no tears, no terrors, of this world or of the next, could move him. The father, and the divine, were equally inexorable. He pleaded his oath, but he remembered his revenge. After the first letter he would receive no more, and when she wrote again and again, with the direction in a different hand, and using other little stratagems, he returned no answer.

From this extreme distress, and from the intolerable disgrace, as my mother supposed it to be, of coming on the parish, we were relieved, to the best of her ability, by a poor widow woman with four children; who had formerly lived a servant in the Trevor family, and who, after her husband's death, maintained herself and her orphans with incredible industry, and with no other aid but the produce of a cow, that she fed chiefly on the common where her cottage stood. The active good sense with which she did every thing that was entrusted to her, was the cause that she never wanted employment; and she exerted her utmost attention to make her children, as they grew up, as useful as herself.

By this woman's advice and aid, my mother applied herself to spinning; and it was agreed that I should either drive the plough or be put apprentice, as soon as I could find a master.

For my own part, all my sources of pleasure and improvement were at once retrenched. That I had not horses to ride, a father to play with and caress me, and a kind uncle to instruct and delight me, were among the least of my misfortunes. Reading, that great field of enjoyment, which was daily opening more amply upon me, was totally cut off. My curiosity had been awakened, my memory praised, and my acuteness admired: in an instant, as it were, all these joys were vanished.

Previous to my uncle's departure, I had found another mode of obtaining knowledge, and applause. He was musical, and a few persons of the like turn, scattered through the neighbouring hamlets, used occasionally to meet at his house; where they exercised themselves in singing, from the works of Croft, Green, Boyce, Purcel, Handel, and such authors as they possessed. One of them played the bassoon, another the flute, and a third the violin. I had a quick ear, was attracted by their harmony, and began to join in their concerts. A treble voice was a great acquisition; I was apt and they encouraged me, by frequent praise and admiration. My uncle gave me Arnold's Psalmody, in which I eagerly studied the rudiments of the science: but this book, with the rest, was swept away in the general wreck; and I, after having had a glimpse of the enchanted land of knowledge, 〈1 page duplicate〉 〈1 page duplicate〉 was cast back, apparently to perish in the gloomy deserts of ignorance. I had no source of information, except my mother; and her stores, at the best, were scanty: at present, labour left her but little leisure, and the little she had was spent in complaint.

The poor widow, indeed, willingly did me every kindness in her power; but that alas was small. With this honest hearted creature I remained eight months, going out to a day's work whenever I could get one, to weed, drive the plough, set potatoes, or any thing else that they would put me to: till at last a farmer, finding me expert, agreed to take me as an apprentice; on condition that I should serve him till I was one and twenty. The offer was joyfully accepted by my mother, and I had spirit and understanding enough to be happy that I could thus provide for myself.

I had soon reason to repent; my master was the most passionate madman I ever beheld; and, when in a passion, the most mischievous. His cattle, his horses, his servants, his wife, his children, were each of them in turn the objects of his fury.

The accidents that happened from his ungovernable choler were continual, and his cruelty, when in these fits, was incredible; though at other times, strange to tell, he was remarkably compassionate. He one day beat out the eye of a calf, because it would not instantly take the milk he offered. Another time he pursued a goose, that ran away from him when he flung it oats; and was so enraged, by the efforts it made to escape, that he first tore off its wing and then twisted its neck round. On a third occasion he bit off a pig's ear, because it struggled and cried while he was ringing it. One of his children was lamed, and, though nobody knew how it happened, every body gave him credit for the accident. Yet he had his paroxysms of fondness for his children, and for the lame boy in particular. Indeed it was generally remarked that he was the most cruel to those for whom he had the greatest affection. The perception of his own absurdity did but increase his rage, till it was exhausted; after which he has sometimes been seen to burst into tears, at the recollection of his own madness and inhumanity.

One habit arising from his excessive vivacity was that, when he wanted any thing done, he expected the person nearest to him should not only instantly obey, but conceive what he meant from the pointing of his finger, the turn of his head, or the motion of his eye, without speaking a word; while the dread of his anger stupified and rendered the person against whom it was directed motionless.

I continued for an unexampled length of time to be his favourite. The family remarked, at first with surprise, and afterward either with a sense of injustice or of enmity, the restraint he put upon himself, and the great partiality with which he treated me. My superior quickness excited his admiration; he held me up as an example, and laid the flattering unction to his soul that he was no tyrant; on the contrary, when people had but common sense, nobody was more kind.

But old habits, though they may suffer a temporary disguise, are devils incarnate. The tide of passion at length broke loose, and with redoubled violence for having suffered constraint. To add to the misfortune, my thirst after knowledge was the cause, or at least the pretext, of this change. It happened that an old book of arithmetic fell in my way, and, as this was at that time the sole treasure of instruction within my reach, I made it my constant companion, carried it in my bosom, and pored over it whenever I could steal a moment to myself. In the heinous act of reading this book I was twice detected, by my moody master. The first time he cautioned me, with fire in his eyes, never to let him catch me idling my time in that manner again; and the second he snatched hold of my ear and gave me so sudden and violent a pull that he brought me to the ground. He did worse, he took away my book, and locked it up.

Hostilities having thus commenced, they soon grew hot, and were pursued with bitterness, tyranny, and malignity. Proceeding from bad to worse, after a while every thing I did was wrong. In proportion as his frenzy became hateful or rather terrible to his own imagination, his cruelty increased. He seemed, in my instance, to have the dread upon him of committing some injury so violent as perhaps to bring him to the gallows; and several times in his chafing fits declared his fear.

This idea haunted him so much that he adopted a new mode of conduct with me, and, instead of kicking me, knocking me down, or hurling the first thing that came to hand at me, gave himself time enough to take the horsewhip. Yet he could not always be thus cautious; and even when he was, such infernal discipline, though less dangerous, was more intolerable.

The scenes I went through with this man, the sufferings I endured, and the stupifying terrors that seized me if I saw but his shadow, I can never forget. Every thing I did was a motive for chastisement; one day it was for having turned the horses out to graze, and the very next for suffering them to stand in the stable. The cattle of his neighbour, for whom he had a mortal enmity, broke into his field during the night; and for this I was most unmercifully flogged the next morning. The pretence was my not having told him that the fence was defective. Rainy weather made him fret, and then I was sure of a beating. If it were fine, he was all hurry, anxiety, and impatience; and to escape the wicked itching of his fingers was impossible.

One effect that he produced might be thought remarkable, had we not the history of Sparta in its favour; and did we not occasionally observe the like in other boys, under tyrannical treatment. The efforts I was obliged to make, to endure the terrible punishment he inflicted and live, at last rendered me, to a certain degree, insensible of pain. They were powerfully aided indeed by the indignant detestation which I felt, and by the something like defiance with which it enabled me to treat him.

This on one occasion exasperated him so much that, seeing me support the lash without a tear and as if disdaining complaint, he franticly snatched up a pitch-fork, drove it at me, and, I luckily avoiding it, struck the prongs into the barn-door; with the exclamation, "damn your soul! I'll make you feel me!" The moment after he was seized with a sense of his own lunacy, turned as pale as death, and stood aghast with horror! My supposed crime was that I had eaten some milk, the last of which I myself had seen the dog lap. Perceiving the terror of his mind, I took courage and told him, "Jowler eat the milk: I saw him, just as he had done. I would not tell you, because I knew if I had you would have hanged the poor dog." This short sentence had such an effect upon him that he dropped on his knees, the tears rolling from his eyes, and cried out in an undescribable agony, "Lord have mercy upon my sinful soul! I shall surely come to be hanged!"

The terror of this lesson remained longer than those who knew him would have expected; but it insensibly wore away.

The efforts I made in the interval to conciliate and avoid wakening the fiend were strenuous, but ineffectual. I shrunk from no labour, and the business with which he intrusted me shewed the confidence he placed in my activity and intelligence. At eleven years old I drove the loaded team, to market or elsewhere, without a superintendant. I was sent in every direction across the country, to bring home sheep, deliver calves to the butcher, fetch cattle, cart coals, or any thing else within my strength.

Various were the distresses in which these duties, and the distempered choler of my master, involved me. On one occasion a wicked boy set his dog at my sheep, and drove them into a turnip field; out of which I could not get them but with great difficulty and loss of time, of which my master demanded a severe account. A calf once broke from me and foolishly tumbled into a water-pit, from which I delivered it at the hazard of my life. Another time, when the roads were heavy, my waggon was set fast in a clay rut, where I was detained above an hour; two drivers refusing to give me a pull because they had both lived with my malicious master; and a third being only prevailed on, for this master of mine was generally hated, by my prayers and tears and the picture I drew of my own distress.

At length the violence of his temper recovered its full elasticity; which was a second time chiefly excited by my earnest longing after knowledge. Notwithstanding that my book was taken from me, my mind was often occupied with the arithmetic I had learned in better days, which had been strongly revived by its contents. At the employment this afforded me I was twice caught by my master; once multiplying and dividing with a nail against the paling, and the second time extracting the square root with chalk on the wall.

These misdemeanours were aggravated by another incident. I one morning happened to find, by good luck as I thought, a half-crown piece that was lying on the high road. The moment I was possessed of this treasure, I began to consider how it ought to be expended. I was in great want of shoes, stockings, and other things; but with those my master was bound to provide me; and, if I attempted to supply myself, the probability was that he would beat me, for not having given him the money.

After pondering again and again on the necessaries I might obtain, the luxuries in which I might indulge, and, what was infinitely more tempting, the stores of learning with which such a sum would furnish me, the recollection of my mother, brother, and sister, for so the young one proved to be, and their distress, with that of the benevolent poor creature who afforded them a shelter, seized me so strongly that I thought it would be wicked not to send my half-crown where it was so much wanted. But how to convey it thither? That was the difficulty. I had no means, no messenger, no soul in whom I durst confide. I therefore resolved for the present to conceal it by pinning it in the lining of my waistcoat; and this was one of those unforeseen events that are generally called lucky chances.

My master's devil was again let loose, and a most uncontrolable devil he was. I had overslept myself, a very uncommon accident with me, and had put him into one of his hateful humours. At breakfast, while eating his bread and cheese, I was set to watch the milk that stood on the fire to boil. By some accident I forgot my office; he saw it rise in the pipkin, looked toward me, could not catch my eye, and, seized with one of his unaccountably hellish fits, sprang forward just as the milk began to boil over, and struck at me with a clasped knife that he held in his hand!

Fortunately for me, the point found resistance, by the saving intervention of my half-crown! The clasp gave way with the violence of the blow, and shutting made a deep gash in his own hand.

Again he turned pale, and, as the blood smeared the floor, knew not I believe whether it was mine or his own. My dame trembling called out, "Are you hurt, Hugh?" for she too saw the blood, and knew not whose it was. I answered, "No:" but with a tremulous voice, being in dread of more blows. They soon descended upon me, after he had discovered his mistake, and it was with difficulty that I escaped being thrown behind the fire.

This was not the end of the history of my half-crown. I kept it above three months till I happened to be sent to the market town, with a load of hay. Here, in passing through the street, my eye as usual was attracted by the bookseller's window. I had not forgotten how rich I was, and could not resist. I went in, examined some of the stores the shop contained, and with great difficulty restrained myself to the purchase of the Seven Champions of Christendom, which cost me a shilling. The other eighteen pence I found an opportunity, it being market day, of sending by a neighbour to my mother; with an injunction that six-pence of it should be given to her poor hostess.

With what eagerness I read the valiant deeds of these valiant knights, as I rode home in my empty cart, I will leave the reader to divine: but he will probably pity me when I inform him that I was so deeply engaged in my book as not to perceive the arrival of the cart at my master's yard gate, and that he himself stood at the barn door, contemplating me in the profound negligence of my studies.

Riding in the cart, neglecting the team, having a new book, and reading in it, formed a catalogue of crimes too black to hope for pardon. Not the horse but the cart whip was the instrument of vengeance; and, after having tired himself and left weals of a finger's breadth on my body, arms, legs, and thighs, he completed his malice this time, not by locking up but by burning my book.

I had already lived a year and a half under the tortures of this demon, till they became so intolerable that at last I determined to run away. I was confirmed in this resolution by another dangerous incident, which terrified me more even than any of the preceding, and convinced me that if I stayed any longer with this villainous savage I could not escape death.

I was one day driving the plough for him when a young horse, not half broken in, was the second in the team. I used my utmost endeavours but could not manage him, and the lunatic my master, who was as strong as he was ferocious, caught up a stone and aimed it at the colt (at least so from his manner at the moment I supposed) but struck me with it, and knocked me down immediately in the furrow, where the plough was coming. I saw the plough-share that in an instant was to cut me in two; but the madman, with an incredible effort, started it out of the earth and flung it fairly over me! Unable however to recover his balance, he trod upon my forehead with his hob-nailed shoe, and cut a deep gash just over my eye, and another in my skull: whether with the same foot or in what manner I do not know. My eye was presently closed up, and my hair steeped in the blood that flowed plentifully from both wounds.

There I lay, stunned for a moment, while he was obliged to attend to the frightened colt, which forced the other horses to run, and was become wholly unmanageable. When I recovered I heard him holloa, and saw him struggling with the horses at the farther end of the field; but the impression of the danger I had just escaped was so strong that my resolution of running away came upon me with irresistible force, and, perceiving him so thoroughly engaged, I immediately put it in execution.

I imagine it was some time before he missed me, and he then probably conjectured I was gone home. Be it as it will, I used my legs without molestation; and, committing myself to chance and the wide world, made the best of my way.

CHAP. IX.

MY FLIGHT: DESPONDING THOUGHTS: ADVENTURE WITH A STRANGER ON THE ROAD: I AM PROMISED RELIEF, BUT LEARN A FEARFUL SECRET THAT AGAIN PLUNGES ME IN DOUBT AND ANXIETY: I REVEAL MYSELF TO A NEAR RELATION: THE STRUGGLES OF PASSION.

THE animation that fear gave me was so great that, though I felt my shirt collar drenched in the blood that flowed from my wounds, I continued to run for at least four miles; and though my pace at length slackened into a walk I still hurried eagerly forward. The dread of again falling into his power, after an attempt so audacious as this, deprived me of any other sense of pain, afforded me strength, and made me forget the completely desolate state to which I had reduced myself. I had no money, no food, no friend in the world. I durst not return to my mother; she was the first person of whom the tyrant would enquire after me. To avoid him was the only plan I yet thought of, and thus impelled I pursued my road.

So long as I was acquainted with the country through which I travelled, I went on without hesitation; but as soon as I found myself entirely beyond my knowledge, I began to look about me. The questions—Where am I? Whither am I going? What am I to do?—inspired a succession of rising fears, which the joy of my deliverance could scarcely counterbalance. I regretted the rash haste with which I had parted with my half-crown. I had not a farthing on earth, I had nothing to sell, nothing to eat, no soul to give me a morsel. It was noon, when I fled from the ploughed field; I had been hard at work from three o'clock in the morning, had since travelled at least twelve or fourteen miles, wounded as I was, and began to feel myself excessively weary, stiff, and craving after food. Where I had got the notion, whether from father, mother, aunt, or uncle, I know not, but I had been taught that to beg was an indelible disgrace; and to steal every body had told me was the road to Tyburn. Starve or hang; that is the law. If I even asked for work, who wanted my service? Who would give me any? Who would not enquire where I came from, and to whom I belonged?

These and many more tormenting ideas were forced upon me by the situation in which I found myself; till at last I was so overcome with fears and fatigue that I sat down to debate whether it were not best, or rather whether I should not be absolutely forced, to turn back.

Still, however, when I came to reflect on the sufferings I had endured, the dangers I had escaped, and the horrible punishment that awaited me if I returned, any expedient seemed better than that terrific project. The distance too, exhausted as I thought myself, was an additional fear, and for a moment I doubted whether I should not lie down and die.

Young minds hold death in peculiar horror, and the very thought inspired returning energy. Among my cogitations I had not forgotten the rector: he was obdurate, hard hearted, and even cruel. But was he so cruel as the fiend from whom I had escaped? From a latent and undefined kind of feeling, I had made toward that side of the country where his village lay; and was, as I supposed, within four or five miles of it. The resolution of making an effort to gain his protection came upon me, and I rose with some alacrity to put it in practice. He kept horses, a coachman, and a stable-boy; he had a garden; he farmed a little, for his amusement. In any of these capacities I could be useful, and, if he would but give me bread, I would do whatever he would put me to. He could not surely be so stony hearted as to refuse. I was inexperienced, and knew not the force of rancour.

I pursued my way ruminating on these hopes, fears, and disasters, toward a village that I saw at a distance, where I intended to inquire the road I meant to take. Descending a hill I came to a bridge, over a rivulet of some depth, with a carriage way through the water.

Just as I had passed it, I met a post-chariot that drove into the stream. I was walking forward with my face toward the village, till I suddenly heard a cry of distress, and looking behind me saw the carriage overturned in the water. I ran with all speed back to the brook: the body of the carriage was almost covered, the horses were both down, and the postillion, entangled between them, called aloud for help! or his master would be drowned. I plunged into the water without fear, having, as I have elsewhere noticed, long ago learned to swim. Perceiving the extreme danger of the person in the carriage, I struck directly toward the door, which I opened and relieved him, or confined as he was he must have been almost instantly suffocated. His terror was exceedingly great, and as soon as he was fairly on his feet, he exclaimed with prodigious eagerness, "God for ever bless you, my good boy; you have saved my life!"—The pallidness of his countenance expressed very strongly the danger of perishing in which he had felt himself.

We then both waded out of the water, he sat down on the side of the bridge, and I called to some men in a neighbouring field to come and help the postillion. I then returned to the gentleman, who was shivering as if in an ague fit. I asked if I should run and get him help, for he seemed very ill? "You are a compassionate brave little fellow," said he; and, looking more earnestly at me, exclaimed, "I hope you are not hurt; how came you so bloody?" I knew not what to say, and returned no answer. "You do not speak, child?" said he. "Let me go and get you some help, Sir," replied I—"Nay, nay, but are you hurt? "—"Not more than I was before this accident"—"Where do you come from?" —I was silent—"Who are you?"—"A poor friendless boy"—"Have you not a father?"—"No"—"A mother?"— "Yes: but she is forsaken by her father, and cannot get bread for herself? "—"How came you in this condition?" —"My master knocked me down and trod on me"—"Knocked you down and trod on you?"—"Yes: he was very cruel to me"—"Cruel indeed! Did he often treat you ill?"—"I do not know what other poor boys suffer, but he was so passionate that I was never safe."— "And you have run away from him?"— "I was afraid he would murder me"— "Poor creature! Your eye is black, your forehead cut, and your hair quite clotted with blood"—"I have a bad gash in my head; but I can bear it. You shake worse and worse; let me go and get you some help; the village is not far off."— "I feel I am not well"—"Shall I call one of the men?"—"Do, my good fellow."

I ran, and the men came; they had set the carriage on its wheels, but it was entirely wet, and not fit to ride in. The gentleman therefore leaned on one of them, walked slowly back to the village, and desired me to follow. I gladly obeyed the order. He had pitied me, I had saved his life; if I could not make a friend I was in danger of starving, and I began to hope that I had now found one.

The best accommodations that the only inn in the village afforded were quickly procured. At first the gentleman ordered a post-chaise, to return home; but he soon felt himself so ill that he desired a bed might be got ready, and in the mean time sent to the nearest medical man, both for himself and to examine my wounds. What was still better, he ordered the people of the house to give me whatever I chose to eat and drink, and told them he had certainly been a dead man at that moment, if it had not been for me. But he would not forget me; he would take care of me as long as he lived.

This was joyful news indeed; or rather something much more exquisite than joyful. My heart melted when I heard him; I burst into tears, and replied, "I would willingly die to serve him."

He then went to bed, and as evening came on the fever with which he was attacked increased. The anxiety I felt was excessive, and I was so earnest in my intreaties to sit and watch by him, that he was prevailed on to grant my request. From what I can now recollect, I imagine the apothecary gave him the common remedy, Dr. James's powders. When the medicine no longer operated he fell into a sound sleep, about eleven o'clock, and when he awoke the next morning found himself much refreshed and free from fever.

In the interim my wounds had been dressed, and to make the truth of my story evident, I took care to shew the bruises, and black and blue marks, with which my body was plentifully covered. Every favourable circumstance, every precaution, every effort was now indeed become necessary; for, late in the evening, I accidentally learned a secret of the most important and hope-inspiring, yet alarming nature. My all was at stake, my very existence seemed to depend on the person who it is true had promised to be my protector, but who, perhaps, when he should hear who I was, might again become my persecutor. The man to whom I had attached myself, whose life I had saved, and who had avowed a sense of the obligation, was no other than my grandfather!

The moment I heard this terrific intelligence, it chilled and animated me alternately; and, as soon as I could recollect myself, I determined not to quit his apartment all night. No persuasions could prevail on me; and when the chambermaid, who sat up with him, attempted to use force, I was so violent in my resistance that she desisted, and suffered me to remain in quiet.

When he awoke in the morning I trembled at the sound of his voice. I remembered the oath he had sworn, which my mother had often affirmed he would never break. He was totally changed, in my idea, from the gentleman whose life I had saved the day before. There had not indeed been any thing particularly winning in his aspect; but then there was a strong sense of danger, and of obligation to the instrument of his escape, who interested him something the more by being unfortunate. But an oath, solemnly taken by a man of so sacred a character? The thought was dreadful!

His curtains were drawn, and my trepidation increased. "What, my good boy," said he, "are you up and here already?" "He has never been in bed," answered the chambermaid. "We could not get him out of the room." I replied in a faint voice, such as my fears inspired, "I hoped he was better." "Yes, yes," said he, "I have had a good sleep, and feel as if I wanted my breakfast; go, my girl, and let it be got ready."

The chambermaid obeyed his orders, and he continued—"Why did not you go to bed, child?"—"It did not become me to leave you"—"How so?" "I hope I know my duty better"—"Your duty!" —"Yes, Sir"—"You seem to be an extraordinary boy; you act with great spirit, and talk with more good sense than I should expect from your poverty and education"—"So I ought to do, Sir; though I am desolate, I have been brought up better than most poor boys" —"Ay indeed!"

The apothecary entered, and, after having paid all necessary attention to his patient, informed him of the state in which he had found me; talked of my wounds and bruises, and the cruelty of the man that could inflict them; repeated several of the anecdotes of his tyranny, which I had told him, and concluded with remarks on my good fortune, in having found so kind a protector.

"The boy has saved my life," said my grandfather, "and he shall not want a friend." "Are you quite sure of that, Sir?" answered I, with emphatical anxiety. "Never, while I live," replied the rector. "Nay, but are you quite quite positive?" "Do you doubt my word, boy?"— "That is very wrong of you indeed, child," said the apothecary.—A thought suddenly struck me. If he would but take an oath, said I to myself? The oath, the oath! that was what I dreaded! An opposite oath seemed to be my only safe-guard. I continued—"I swear, Sir, while I have life never to forsake you, but to be dutiful and true to you"— "Swear boy?"—"Yes, Sir, most solemnly."—I spoke with great fervor— "You are an unaccountable boy"— "Oh that you would never forsake me" —"I tell you I will not"—"Oh that you never would!"—"Won't you believe me?"—"Oh that you never never would!"—"The boy I believe wants me to swear too"—"Ay; do, Sir; take an oath not to disown me; and indeed indeed I'll die willingly to deserve your favour"— "Disown you"—"Nay, Sir, but take an oath. You say I saved your life; I would lay down my own again and again to save it. Do not deny me, do not turn me to starve, or send me back to be murdered by my barbarous master"—"I tell you I will not"—"Nay but"—"Well then I swear, boy, I will not"—"Do you indeed duly and truly swear?"—"Solemnly, boy! I take heaven to witness that, if you are not guilty of something very wicked, while I live I will provide for you."—I fell on my knees, caught hold of his hand, burst into tears, and exclaimed with sobs— "God in heaven bless my dear clear good grandfather! He has forgiven me! He has forgiven me!" "Grandfather?" "I am Hugh Trevor."

Never did I behold so sudden a change in the human countenance! The rector's eyes glared at me! There was something ghastly in the sunken form of his features! My shirt was still red, and my coat spotted with blood; the hair had been cut away from the wound on my head, which was covered with a large plaister. My eye was black, and swelled up, and my forehead too was plaistered above the eye-brow. My body he had been told was covered with bruises, tears bathed my cheeks, and my face was agitated with something like convulsive emotions. This strange figure was suddenly changed into his grandson! it was an apparition he knew not how to endure. To be claimed by such a wretched creature, to have been himself the author of his wretchedness, to have had an oath extorted from him, in direct violation of an opposite oath, to feel this universal shock to his pride and his prejudices was a complication of jarring sensations that confounded him. To resist was an effort beyond his strength. For a moment he lost his voice: at last he exclaimed, with a hoarse scream—"Take him away"—My heart sunk within me. The apothecary stood petrified with astonishment. The rector again repeated with increasing agony—"Take him away! Begone! Never let me see him more!"

The pang I felt was unutterable. I rose with a feeling of despair that was annihilating, and was going broken hearted out of the room. At that instant the figure of my master started to recollection, and with such terror as to subdue every other fear. I turned back, fell on my knees again, and clasping my hands cried out, "For God Almighty's sake, do not send me back to my master! I shall never escape with life! He will murder me! He will murder me! I'll be your servant as long as I live. I will go of your errands; take care of your horses; drive your plough; weed your garden; do any thing you bid me; indeed, indeed I will.—Do not send me back to be murdered!"

The excess of my feelings had something of a calming effect on those of the rector. He repeated, "Go go, boy, go? I feel myself very ill!" The apothecary recovered his tongue and added, "Ay, my good child, you had better go."

The altered voice of the rector removed a part of the load that oppressed me, and I left the room, though with no little sensation of despondency. In about half an hour the apothecary came down. He had had a conversation with the rector, who I found could not endure the sight of me again, under my present forlorn or rather accusing form. The remembrance however that I had saved his life was predominant. How his casuistry settled the account between his two oaths I never heard; on that subject he was eternally silent. He was probably ashamed of having taken the first, and of having been tricked out of the second. His orders were that I should go home with the apothecary, with whom he had arranged matters, should be new clothed, wait till my wounds were healed, and then, if he possibly could, he would prevail upon himself to see me.

CHAP. X.

HOPES IN BEHALF OF MY MOTHER: THE ARRIVAL OF THE HECTOR: I GAIN HIS FAVOUR: AM ADOPTED BY HIM: AND EFFECT A FAMILY RECONCILIATION. ANECDOTES OF A SCHOOL-FELLOW, AND HIS SISTER: GRAMMATICAL AND MUSICAL STUDIES: CAUSES OF DISCONTENT BETWEEN THE SQUIRE AND THE RECTOR: TYTHES AND LAW PRODUCE QUARRELS: THE TRAGI-COMIC TALE OF THE RATS.

SIX weeks had elapsed before my wounds, bruises, and black marks, had totally disappeared; and the scar above my eye still retained a red appearance. The alteration of my person however, aided as it was by dress, was so remarkable as to excite surprise among my village friends. The apothecary prided himself upon the change, persuading himself that the rector would thank him for the present of so fine a grandson. His art and care had wrought miracles, I was quite another creature; the alteration was so prodigious since he had taken me that he was sure there was not so fine a boy in all England.

In the mean time I had written to my mother, whose cottage was about ten miles across the country, from the village where the apothecary lived. He would not permit me to go to her, it might offend the rector; but he agreed that, if she should by chance come to me, there could be no harm in my speaking to my mother. He too understood casuistry. She accordingly came to see me, and was overjoyed at what had happened; it might lead to a general reconciliation: especially now that my brother and sister were both dead. They had been carried off by the small-pox; and she rightly enough conjectured that the rector would not be the less prone to pardon her for being clear of further incumbrance. She enjoined me to intercede in her behalf, and I very sincerely promised to speak as soon as I dared.

The day at last came on which the rector was to pay his visit, and examine how far I was fit to be his grandson. My terror by this time had considerably abated: he having taken thus much notice of me, I scarcely could believe myself in danger of being rejected. I was not however without trepidation, and when the well known post chariot drove up to the door my heart sunk within me.

The apothecary had two sons, one a year older, and the other some months younger than I was. The eldest was deformed, and his brother squinted abominably. Curiosity had brought them and the whole family into the parlour, to be spectators of the interview. My grandfather entered; I was dressed as genteelly as every effort of the village taylor could contrive; an appearance so different from that of the beaten, bruised, and wounded poor elf he first had seen, with clouted shoes, torn stockings, and coarse coating, dripping with water, and clotted with blood, was so great as scarcely to be credible. The ugliness of my companions did but enhance the superiority of my look; he could not be mistaken in which was his grandson, and the pleasure my pre-eminence inspired excited a smile of no little approbation. For my part I had conceived an affection for him; first I had saved his life, then he had relieved me from distress, and now was come to own me as his grandson. The change of my present situation from that in which I had endured so much misery gave me ineffable pleasure. The entrance of the rector, who had been the cause of this change, and the smile with which he regarded me went to my heart. I kneeled, my eyes flowing in tears, and begged his blessing. He gave it, bade me rise, and thus made me one of the happiest creatures existing.

The rector stayed some time to settle accounts with the apothecary, after which the postillion was called, leave was taken, and I found myself seated beside my grandfather, in that fortunate post chariot from which I had so happily extricated him.

How extreme are the vicissitudes of life! What a reverse of fortune was here! From hard fare, severe labour, and a brutal tyrant, to plenty, ease, and smiling felicity. No longer chained in poverty and ignorance, I now had free access to the precious mines of knowledge. Far from being restrained, I had every encouragement to pursue inquiry; and the happiness of the change was at first so great as almost to be incredible. But the youthful mind easily acquires new habits, and my character varied with the accidents by which it was influenced. Yet, to use my father's language, the case-hardening I had received tempered my future life, and prepared me to endure those misfortunes with fortitude which might otherwise have broken my spirit.

From the day that I arrived at the rectory, I increased so fast in my grandfather's favour that he scarcely knew how to deny me a request. I was soon bold enough to petition for my mother; and though the pill at first was bitter, my repeated importunities at length prevailed, and the rector agreed that, when his daughter should have sufficiently humbled herself, in terms suited to his dignity and her degradation, she should be permitted to kneel at his footstool for pardon, instead of perishing like an out-cast as she deserved.

It was not to be expected that my mother should object to the conditions; the alternative was very simple, submit or starve. Beside she had been too much accustomed to the display of the collective authority, accumulated in the person of the rector, to think of contest. His government was patriarchal, and his powers plenipotentiary. He was the head of his family, the priest of the parish, the justice of peace for the hundred, and the greatest man of miles around. He had no rival, except the before-mentioned Squire Mowbray, whom, if divines can hate, I certainly think he hated.

Of the claims of my late master over me, as his apprentice, I never heard more. Perhaps there was no indenture, for I do not recollect to have signed one; but if there were he certainly was too conscious of his guilt to dare to enforce his right, now that he found me acknowledged and protected by a man so powerful as my grandfather. It is possible indeed that he should never have heard what became of me; though I consider that as very improbable. While I was at Oxford, I was informed that he died raving, with a fever in the brain.

I have mentioned the encouragement I received to pursue inquiry: one of the first things the rector thought of was my education. Now that he had owned I was indeed his grandson, it was fitting that his grandson should be a gentleman. In the parish committed to his pastoral guidance was a grammar school, that had been endowed, not indeed by Squire Mowbray or his ancestors, but, by the family that in times of yore had held the same estate. The pious founder had vested the government not entirely in his own family, and its representatives, but in that family and the rector for the time being. This circumstance, and many others of a parochial nature, conduced to a kind of partition of power, well calculated to excite contempt in the wealthy Squire, who was likewise lord of the manor, and inflame jealousy in heaven's holy vice-gerent, whose very office on earth is to govern, and to detect, reprove, and rectify, the wanderings of us silly sheep.

To this school I was immediately sent; and here, among other competitors was the Squire's eldest son, Hector Mowbray. He was two years older than I, and in the high exercise of that power to which he was the redoubted heir. To insult the boys, seize their marbles, split their tops, cuff them if they muttered, kick them if they complained to the master, get them flogged if they kicked and cuffed in return, and tyrannize over them to the very stretch of his invention, were practices in which he daily made himself more and more expert. He was the young Squire, and that was a receipt in full for all demands.

I soon came to understand that he was the son of a great man! a very great man indeed! and that there was a prodigious difference between flesh and blood of a squire's propagating, and that of ordinary breed. But I heard it so often repeated, and saw it proved in such a variety of instances, that I too was the grandson of a great man, ay so great as openly to declare war against, or at least bid defiance to, the giant power of Magog Mowbray (it was an epithet of my grandfather's giving) I say, I was so fully convinced that I myself was the son of somebody (pshaw! I mean the grandson) that no sooner did young Hector begin to exercise his ingenuity upon me, than I found myself exceedingly disposed to rebel. I had been bred in a hardy school.

At my first admission into this seminary, I did not immediately and fully enter into the spirit and practice of the place; though I soon became tolerably active. At robbing orchards, tying up latches, lifting gates, breaking down hedges, and driving cattle astray, I was by no means so great a proficient as Hector; nor had I 〈1 page duplicate〉 〈1 page duplicate〉 any great affection for swimming hedgehogs, hunting cats, or setting dogs at boys and beggars; but at climbing trees, running, leaping, swimming, and such like exercises, I was among the most alert.

My courage too was soon put to the proof, and my opponents found that I entered on action with very tolerable alacrity; so that not to mention sparrings and skirmishes, from which having begun I was never the first to flinch, I had not been a year at school, before I had been declared the conqueror in three set battles. The third was with a butcher's boy, in defence of Hector, who for once instead of giving had suffered insult, but who, though older and stronger than I was, had not the courage to attack his hardy antagonist. My victory was dearly earned, for the boy was considerably my superior in age and strength, and bred to the sport. But this defence of him, and the fear of having me for a foe, induced Hector to court my favour, and often to invite me to Mowbray Hall.

Nor did the whole of my fame end here; the first day I entered the school I was allowed to be the best English scholar, excepting one Turl, a youth noted for his talents, and who while he remained there continually kept his place in every class, as head boy. But this was no triumph over me, for beside having been so long at school, he had three or four years the advantage of me in point of age. Neither did my thirst of inquiry abate, and I had now not only books but instructors; on the contrary, my eagerness increased, and my progress both in Latin and Greek was rapid. The rector was astonished at it, and was often embarrassed by the questions which my desire of learning impelled me to put.

Among my other acquirements, I became a practical musician. The rector could strum the bass tolerably, and his friend the lawyer could play the violin, in which however he was excelled by the clerk of the parish. I retained some remembrance of what I had formerly studied, and felt a great desire to learn; the rector encouraged it, and as the clerk is always the very humble servant and slave of the parson, he was inducted my music master. I loved the art, so that in less than twelve months I had made a sufficient progress to join in Corelli's and even Handel's trios, and thus to strengthen the parsonage-house band.

People who hate each other do yet visit and keep up an intercourse, according to set forms, purposely to conceal their hatred; it being a hideous and degrading vice, of which all men are more or less either ashamed or afraid. To preserve these appearances, or perhaps from the impulse of vanity, the rector admitted of my excursions to Mowbray Hall. For my own part, I found a motive more alluring than the society of Hector, that frequently occasioned me to repeat these vists. His sister, Olivia, two years younger than myself, was usually one of our parlour playmates. Born of the same mother, living in the same family, accustomed to the same manners, it is difficult to account for the very opposite propensities of this brother and sister. Every thing the reverse of what has been recited of Hector was visible in Olivia. He was boisterous, selfish, and brutal; she was compassionate, generous, and gentle: his faculties were sluggish, obtuse, and confined; hers were acute, discriminating, and capacious: his want of feeling made him delight to inflict torture; her extreme sensibility made her fly to administer relief. The company of Olivia soon became very attractive, and the rambles that I have sometimes taken with her, hand in hand over Mowbray Park, afforded no common delight. She too was a musician, and already famous for her fine voice and execution on the harpsichord. I accompanied her on the violin, and sang duets with her so as to surprize and even charm the Squire, and throw the visitors at Mowbray Hall into raptures.

This sweet intercourse however was terminated by the bickerings, back-bitings, and smothered jealousies, between the Squire and my grandfather, which at length burst into a slame. The Squire had succeeded to his estate and manor by the death of a very distant relation, and by this relation the rector had been presented to his living: he therefore considered himself as under no kind of obligation to the Squire; while the latter on the contrary, the advowson being parcel and part of the manor, held the manor, and himself as owner of the manor, to be the actual donor.

To all this was added another very serious cause of discontent, that of tythes; a cause that disturbs half the villages in the kingdom, and that frequently exhibits the man who is sent to preach peace, and afford an example of mild forbearance and christian humility, as a litigious, quarrelsome and odious tyrant; much better qualified to herd with wolves than to be the shepherd of his meek master. It is sufficiently certain that neither Christ nor his apostles ever took tythes; and the esquires, farmers, and landholders, of this christian kingdom, would in general be better satisfied, if their successors were to follow so disinterested and laudable an example.

My grandfather had accepted his rectory at the same commutation that the former incumbent had enjoyed it; and, while the patron to whom he owed the presentation was living, he contented himself with his bargain as well as he could: but, soon after the accession of Squire Mowbray, considering that tie as no longer a clog to his conscience, he began to inquire very seriously into the real value of his first fruits and tythes, personal, predial, and mixed: that is, his great tythes and his small. The calculation inflamed his avarice, and he purchased and read all the books on the subject of tythes he could collect. Being fond of power, and having discovered (as he supposed) that the man who knows the most quirks in law has the greatest quantity of power over his simple and ignorant neighbours, he was a tolerably laborious and successful student of these quirks. I say, tolerably; for it seldom happens that the rector is the most industrious person in the parish.

It was thus that, after having made the whole hundred tremble at his authority, in the exercise of his office of justice of the peace, he next hoped to conquer the Behemoth, Magog Mowbray himself. His own fears of being vanquished and the advice of his friends had indeed, for years, prevented him from proceeding to an open rupture with his parish, and the Squire at its head: but his irritability had been gradually increasing ever since the departure of my uncle Elford. The progress of his avarice at first was slow; but it gained strength as it proceeded, and there was now no one whose opinion had sufficient weight with him to keep it longer quiet. His friend the lawyer, it is true, might have had some such influence over him; but the lawyer had been duly articled to the most famous, that is the most litigious, attorney in the country, and was himself his very famous successor; a practitioner of the first repute.

The Squire, by a trick he thought proper to play, contributed not a little to kindle the smothering embers. My grandfather having announced his intention of demanding a commutation of nearly double the sum, or of being paid his tythes in kind—first his tythes de jure, and next his tythes by custom; enumerating them all and each; corn, hay, hops and hemp; fruits, roots, seeds and weeds; wool, milk, chickens, ducklings, and goslings, or eggs; corn rakings and pond drawings; not forgetting agistment and subbois, or sylva caedua; with many many more of the sweets of our prolific mother earth, which I would enumerate if I did but recollect them, and for which men so often have been and still are impleaded in Court Christian—these particulars, I say, being recapitulated and set forth in terrible array, by the rector, excited in the whole parish so much dread of the rapacious vulture, who was coming with such a swoop upon them, that high and low, young and old, rich and poor, all began to tremble.

The Squire was the only man, at first, who durst bid defiance to the general ravager. The rector's deviation from his original commutation agreement threw him into a rage, and he panted for an opportunity of shewing the contempt in which he held my grandfather and his threats.

Malicious chance favoured his wishes. It happened, while his passions were in full force, that a rat-catcher arrived at Mowbray Hall; which at that time was greatly infested by the large Norway rats. The man had the art of taking them alive, and was accordingly employed by the Squire. While he was preparing to perform his business, the gentle Olivia, very innocently and without any foresight of consequences, chanced to say— "I do not think, papa, that our good rector, who considers all things as tytheable, would be much pleased to have his tythe of rats"—The Squire no sooner heard this sentence uttered than he began to dance and halloo, like a madman; swearing most vociferously—"By G—, wench, he shall ha' um! He shall ha' um! He shall ha' um!"

His boisterous joy at this rare thought, which was indeed far beyond the discovery of his own brain, could not be appeased; nor could Olivia, sorry for what she had done, prevent him from most resolutely determining to put it in practice. The ratcatcher was immediately ordered to entrap as many of his best friends as he possibly could; and a carpenter was set to work to make a covered box, for the rector's tythe-rats, with a lifting door. Hector Mowbray was consulted on the whole progress; and the fancies of father and son were tickled to excess, by the happy prank they were about to play.

The rats were caught, the box was made, and the ratcatcher commanded to select the finest, fattest and largest of them, and enclose them in their cage. In order to heighten and secure their enjoyment, the Squire and Hector chose four of the stoutest servants, gave the cage into their custody, and ordered the ratcatcher to attend. Away they then went in turbulent procession. They even wanted Olivia to go with them to see the sport; and young Hector, probably with malice prepense against me, when she refused, was for using force; but she was a favourite with the Squire, and being very determined was suffered to remain at home.

Arrived at the parsonage-house, they entered the hall. The Squire loudly called for the rector. The noise and vociferation of their approach had rouzed his attention, and he was not long in coming. The servants too were collected, some without the door and others of more authority within it, to hear and see what all this could mean. I likewise was one of the company.—"Here! here! Mr. Rector," bawled the Squire, "we ha' brought you your due. I'll warrant, for once, you sha'n't grumble that we do not pay you your tythes!"

My grandfather, hearing this address, seeing the covered cage, and remarking the malicious grins of the Squire and his whole posse, knew not what to think, and began to suspect there was mischief in the wind—"By the waunds! mister tythe taker," continued the Squire, "but you shall ha' your own! Here, lads, lift up the cage: put it on the table; let his reverence see what we ha' brought'n! Come, raise the door!"

The men, with each a broad grin upon his countenance, did as they were bidden: they lifted up the box, raised the door, and out burst above twenty of the largest wildest rats the well stocked barns of Mowbray Hall could afford. Their numbers, their squealing, their ferocity, their attempts to escape, and the bounds they gave from side to side struck the whole parsonage house community with a panic. The women screamed; the rector foamed; the squire hallooed; and the men seized bellows, poker, tongs, and every other weapon or missile that was at hand. The uproar was universal, and the Squire never before or after felt himself so great a hero! The death of the fox itself was unequal to it!

This was but the first act of the farce, the catastrophe of which had something in it of a more tragical cast. Servants partake of the prejudices of their masters, and the whole parsonage-house, young and old, male and female, felt itself insulted. No sooner therefore were the rats discomfited than the rector, summoning all his magisterial and orthodox dignity, commanded the Squire and his troop to depart. Despising the mandate, Magog Mowbray continued his exultations and coarse sarcasms; and, Oh frailty of human nature! the man of God forgot the peaceful precepts of his divine mission, and gave the signal for a general assault. Nay he himself, so unruly are the hands and feet even of a parson in a passion, was one of the most eager combatants. Age itself could not bind his arms.

The battle raged, fierce and dreadful, for sometime in the hall: but heroism soon found it wanted elbow-room, and the two armies by mutual consent sallied forth. Numbers were in our favour, for the very maids, armed with mop-handles, broomsticks, and rolling pins, acted like Amazons. I was far from idle, for I had singled out my foe. Hector, whose courage example had enflamed to a very unruly height, had even dared to begin the attack; and I was no less alert in opposition. But though he was Hector, I as it happened was Achilles, and bestowed my wrath upon him most unsparingly. In fine, valour, victory, and right, were for once united, and we very fairly put the Squire, his heir, his rat-catcher, and his beef-eaters to flight.

The rector, dreading a second attack from the enemy, began to fortify his castle, provide ammunition, and arrange his troops. I acted as his aid de camp, burning to be myself commander in chief. But the caution was superfluous: the Squire, like his son, was rather revengeful than valorous, and returned no more to the field.

In the parish however the fortune of the day might be said to wear a very different face, for there was not a farmer who did not triumph at the tythe in kind, which had been paid to the rector; and it became a general threat to sweep the parish of moles, weazles, stoats, polecats and vermin of every species, and tenant the rectory with them, if any thing more was heard on the subject of tythes. Neither did detraction forget to remind the rector of his age, and how shameful it was for a man with one foot in the grave to quarrel with and rob the poor farmers, whom he was hired to guide, console, and love. The poor farmers forgot that, in the eye of the law, the robbery was theirs; and the rector forgot that in the eye of justice and common sense, he had already more than enough. The framers of the law too forgot that to hire a man to love a whole parish is but a blundering kind of a mode. But such mistakes are daily made.

CHAP. XI.

DIFFERENT ACCOUNTS OF THE BATTLE: OLIVIA OFFENDED: LEGAL DISTINCTIONS, AND LAWSUITS COMMENCED.

THE rumours of the village soon made it apparent that the history of the battle royal, as given by the vanquished party, like many other histories, deviated in various particulars from the strict truth. Thus the Squire asserted that he and his myrmidons quitted the field victoriously, drums beating and colours flying; after having driven the enemy back into their citadel and strong holds, out of which they durst not peep: and to the truth of what the Squire asserted his trusty adherents made it a case of conscience to swear.

Encouraged by so good an example, Hector vaunted loudly of his own high feats of arms; and by his narration made it appear, not only how much he had the best of the battle with me, but that it was by kicking him when up, kneeing him when down, striking him when rising, and other such like cowardly foul and malicious acts, that he brought home such a quantity of bruises (of which with all his valour he bitterly complained) together with a pair of black eyes.

Knowing my partiality for his sister, and suspecting that Olivia herself was not without her inclinations, he did not fail to repeat these particulars when she was present; carefully adding such other injurious accusations and epithets as might most effectually lower me in her esteem. His efforts were successful: Olivia was offended, first that her brother should be so cruelly beaten by one of whom she had conceived so kindly, and next that it should be by such base and dishonourable means. Thus one of my chief pleasures, that of visiting at Mowbray Hall, admiring and sometimes mounting the Squire's hunters, and straying through the gardens and grounds with the gentle Olivia, was cut off.

Hector by this time had passed the age of sixteen, and the wrath of the Squire rose so high that he would not suffer him any longer to go to the same school with me: for which reason, it being a part of his plan to send his heir to the university, that he might not only be a Squire but a man of learning, and thus become greater even than his father before him, preparations and arrangements were made something sooner than had been intended, and not long afterward he was entered a gentleman commoner of ****** college, Oxford.

It has been noticed that the farmers thought more of the vexation of their case than of the law; but not so the rector; he thought first of the law, and the law told him that the vexation of the case relative to tythes, was all in his favour. Of the late affray with the Squire indeed he had his doubts. As for the entrance upon his premises, though it might be pleaded it was for a lawful purpose, namely, that of paying tythes, yet, as rats were ferae naturae, and therefore things not tythable, it was very plain that this was a case of trespass ab initio, and his action would lie for a trespass vi et armis. But unfortunately passion had prevented him from waiting to bring his action, and he had assumed the vi et armis to himself in the first instance, not having patience to attend the slow and limping pace of the law. He was not indeed quite certain that, although he and his party gave the first blows, an action of battery brought against Mowbray might not be justified: for did he not come upon him in full force; he, the rector, being in the peace of God and our Lord the King? And did not he, the Squire, by shouting and oaths and blasphemous words, put him, the rector, in bodily fear? And was not the very act of turning ferocious animals, namely, Norway rats, loose in his hall, to the danger of his face, eyes, and throat, a very indubitable and sufficient assault? Was it not likewise clearly in self defence, that the rector and his faithful servants did molliter manus imponere on the Squire and his crew?—The molliter it is true appeared rather doubtful: but then it was a term of law, and would bear that exact signification which the circumstances of the case required, and lawyers so well know how to give.

Thus, with law in his head, wrath in his heart, and money in his pocket, away went the rector to hold consultations with his now favourite friend the attorney; who has before been mentioned as so thorough bred and far famed a practitioner; the result of which was that an action of trespass upon the case, as the safest mode of proceeding, should be brought against the Squire; and that public information should be given that tythes in kind would in six months be demanded from the whole parish; with a formal notice that as malicious threatenings had been uttered against the rector, whom the laws, civil, common, and ecclesiastical, would protect, if any such threatenings should be put in execution actions against the offenders would immediately be instituted.

It was the spring of the year when these resolutions were taken, and before the end of the following November the rector, in consequence of squabbles insults and frauds, had brought actions against more than half his parishioners; by which the attornies, counsellors, and courts were in the end the only gainers, while plaintiff and defendant most ardently concurred and rejoiced in the ruin of each other. But so it is: anger, avarice, and law are terrible things; and malice and selfishness are indefatigable foes.

CHAP. XII.

PROGRESS OF MY STUDIES: MY PREDILECTION IN FAVOUR OF THEOLOGY: THE DECAY OF THE RECTOR: HIS TESTAMENT, DEATH, AND FUNERAL.

THREE additional years passed away under the auspices of my grandfather, during which he pursued his law-suits and I my studies; though with very different success; he lost the dearest thing on earth to him, his money; and I gained the dearest thing on earth to me, knowledge. Among other superfluous appendages, superfluous to him for he made but little use of it, he had a good library. Not of his own collecting; he enjoyed it by descent. This was my daily resort. Its treasures were inexhaustible, and my desire of information could not be satiated. I spent many happy hours in it, and it is still remembered by me with that sweet pleasure which its contents were so well calculated to impart.

I had another accidental advantage. The usher of the school got preferment, and his successor happened to be well read, both in the dead and living languages. This person, whose name was Wilmot, was not only a good scholar and an amiable man but an excellent poet. He had an affection for me, and I almost worshipped him. He was assiduous to teach me every thing he knew; and fortunately I was no less apt and eager to learn. Having already made a tolerable proficiency in the learned languages, the richness of the French in authors made me labour to acquire it with avidity. The Italian poets were equally inviting; so that, by his aid, I mastered the idioms and attained the spirit of both those languages. The dialects of the Teutonic were likewise familiar to him, and I made some progress in the German; being desirous 〈1 page duplicate〉 〈1 page duplicate〉 from his recommendation to read, among others, the works of Lessing, Klopstock, Goethe, and Schiller. The acquirement of knowledge is an essential and therefore a pure pleasure; and my time, though laboriously spent, glided swiftly and happily away.

With respect to amusement, the violin became my favourite. My now dearest friend, the usher, among his other attainments was a musician: my affection for him had made him intimate at the parsonage-house, and his aid greatly promoted our musical parties.

Finding knowledge thus delightful, my zeal to promulgate it was great. I had as I imagined so much to communicate, that I panted for an opportunity to address myself to multitudes. At that time I knew no place so well calculated for this purpose as the pulpit; and my inclination to be a preacher was tolerably conformable to the views of the rector. Not but he had his doubts. Few men are satisfied with their own profession; and though he had great veneration for church authority, which he held to be infinitely superior from its very nature to civil government, yet his propensity to dabble in the law had practically and theoretically taught him some of the advantages of its professors. In rank it was true that the Archbishop of Canterbury was the second man in the kingdom, and in the rector's opinion ought to have been indisputably the first. In days of yore, who so potent? But obsolete titles are not equal to actual possessions. The Lord High Chancellor, in this degenerate age, enjoys much more political power. Neither does it in general die with him, like that of the Archbishop. He seldom fails to bequeath an earldom, of a barony at least, to his heir.

On these subjects I had frequent lectures from my grandfather, who perceiving the enterprise of my temper and the progress of my studies, began to entertain hopes that from his loins some future noble family might descend: that is, provided I would follow the advice which he so well knew how to bestow. In support of his argument, he would give me the history of the origin of various Barons, Viscounts, and Earls, which he could trace to some of the lowest departments of the law.

Thus, though he was convinced that the sacerdotal character claimed unlimited authority by right divine, yet, from the perverse and degenerate nature of man, it was most lamentably sinking into decay; while that of the law was rising on its ruins. Had he been a man of the world instead of the rector of a village, he would have heard of another profession, superior to them both for the attainment of what he most coveted, power, rank, and wealth; and would have known that the lawyer only soars to the possession of these supposed blessings by learning a new trade; that is, by making himself a politician.

The effect his maxims produced on me was a conviction that divinity and law were two super-excellent things. But my mind from many circumstances had acquired a moral turn; and, as I at that time supposed morality and religion to be the same, the current of my inclinations was strong in favour of divinity. Whoever imagines the youthful mind cannot easily acquire such moral propensities has never observed it, except when habit and example have already taught it to be perverse. I speak from experience, and well know how much the accounts I had read of Aristides, Epaminondas, Regulus, Cato, and innumerable other great characters among the ancients inflamed my imagination, and gave me a rooted love of virtue; so that even the vulgarly supposed dry precepts of Seneca and Epictetus were perused by me with delight; and with an emulous determination to put them in practice.

My morality however was far from pure: it was such a mixture of truth and error as was communicated to me by conversation, books, and the incidents of life. From the glow of poetry I learnt many noble precepts; but from the same source I derived the pernicious supposition that to conquer countries and exterminate men are the acts of heroes. Further instances would be superfluous: I mean only to remark that, while I was gaining numerous truths, I was likewise confirming myself in various prejudices; many of which it has been the labour of years aided by the lessons of accident to eradicate; and many more no doubt still remain undetected.

And now the period approached when I was to adventure forth into that world of which I had experienced something, had heard so much, and with which I was so impatient to become still better acquainted. The weight of age began to press upon the rector and he had an apoplectic fit, at which he was very seriously alarmed. He then thought it high time to put his temporal affairs into the best order that his own folly would admit; for, in consequence of his law-suits, they were so much in the hands and power of his friend, the lawyer, that notwithstanding the plausibility and professions of the latter, he trembled when he came to reflect how much they were involved. His former parsimony had led him to hope he should leave great wealth behind him; but, when he came to consult his friend concerning his will, he had the mortification to find how much it had been diminished by his litigious avarice.

The will however was made, but it was under this friend's direction and influence. The lawyer was a lawyer, and, affecting the character of disinterestedness, reminded the rector of the folly of youth, and in how short a period money that had taken a life to acquire was frequently squandered, by a thoughtless heir. His advice therefore was that the property should be left to my mother, and that she should have a joint executor. This executor ought to be the most honest of men and the dearest of friends, or he would never perform so very arduous and unprofitable a task with fidelity and effect: a task as thankless as it is laborious, and which nothing should prevail on him to undertake, but the desire to serve some very dear and much esteemed friend.

With respect to my mother and me, I was her darling, and there was no danger that she should marry again; at least infinitely less than that a young man should abuse wealth, of which he had not by experience learned the value. By making me dependent, my assiduity would be increased: but, that all might be safe, it might perhaps be well to set apart a sum, for my maintenance at the university; and, if I should decide for the church when I quitted it, another for the purchase of an advowson; or, if for the law, to place me in the office of some eminent practitioner.

This counsel was so much that of a man of foresight, and knowledge of the world, that my grandfather heard it with pleasure. It was literally followed. One hundred per annum for four years residence at the university was allotted me; and a legacy of a thousand pounds was added, which, though the purchase of an advowson was recommended, was entrusted to my discretion, and when I should come of age left to my own disposal. The will was then copied and signed, and the lawyer, at the request of a dear and dying friend, was prevailed on to be joint executor with my mother. This was the last legal act and deed of the rector, for he died within a month; and with him died his few friendships, his many enmities, and his destructive law-suits. His spiritual flock was right glad that he was gone; and his funeral was only attended by my mother, myself, the lawyer, the master and usher of the grammar school, and a few visiting friends.

When the will was opened, I and my mother were necessarily present. The rector had detailed the arguments which his friend had suggested: he mentioned his fears of youthful folly, but spoke of me with affection and hope, and seriously warned my mother, for my sake, to beware of a second marriage; with which requisition she very solemny affirmed it was her determination to comply. I was young and high in expectation; for Hugh the second was scarcely less sanguine of temper than Hugh the first. Few people in the world, I was persuaded, were possessed of such extraordinary abilities as myself. I had read, in a thousand places, of the high rewards bestowed on men of learning, wit, and genius; I was therefore eager to sally forth, convinced that I need only be seen to be admired, and known to be employed. These ideas were so familiar to my mind that I intreated my mother to lay no restraint upon her inclinations, for I well knew how to provide for myself: but she was wounded by the request, and begged I would not kill her, by a supposition so cutting, so unaffectionate, and so unamiable. The energy with which she expressed herself somewhat surprized me: a kind of good humoured chearfulness, which resembled indifference rather than sentiment, was the leading feature in my mother's character. She was however on this occasion more sentimental, because as I supposed more in earnest, than usual.

CHAP. XIII.

PREPARATIONS FOR PARTING: A JOURNEY: MORE OF EDUCATION, OR SOMETHING TO BE LEARNED IN A STAGE COACH.

THESE solemn affairs being adjusted, and by the lapse of a few weeks we the mourners more reconciled to our loss, it began to be necessary for me to prepare for my removal to the university: for it was there only, according to the wise laws of our wise fore-fathers (and who will dare to suppose that our forefathers were foolish, or could make foolish laws?) that a regular and incontestible induction can be obtained to the holy ministry, of which I was ambitious.

It was determined I should enter of ****** college, Oxford; the same at which Hector Mowbray had been admitted, and to which all the scholars from the grammar school where I was educated repaired. But there was a warm contest whether I should enter as a commoner, or a gentleman commoner. My mother was eager for the latter, which the lawyer opposed. She could not endure that her dear Hugh should, as it were publicly, confess the superiority of his rival and sworn foe, the insolent Hector. He contended that to affect to rival him in expence were absurd, and might lead to destructive consequences. The lawyer had the best of the argument, yet I was inclined to take part with my mother. Inferiority was what I was little disposed to acknowledge; I therefore consulted my friend the usher. Fortunately he had more wisdom, and alledged some very convincing moral motives, which I too much respected to disobey.

Previous to my departure, I endured much lecturing, which I considered as exceedingly useless, and consequently little less than impertinent. The lawyer reminded me of my youth, and warned me against the knavery of mankind, who he affirmed are universally prone to prey upon one another. This, miracles out of the question, must be the creed of a lawyer. I had a better opinion of my fellow bipeds, of whom I yet knew but little, and heard him with something like contempt. My mother wearied me with intreaties to write to her at least once a week. She should never be easy out of my sight, if she did not hear from me frequently. The omission of a mail would throw her into the utmost terrors: she should conclude I was sick, or dying, nay perhaps dead, and she conjured me to respect her maternal feelings. I did respect them, and promised all she required. She was desirous too that I should continually be with her, during the vacations. The lawyer on the contrary advised me to remain at college, and pursue my studies.

It will seem very unnatural to most mothers, and highly censurable to many moralists, that the person whom I felt the greatest regret at parting with was my instructor and friend, the usher. He was no less affectionate. He too cautioned me against youthful confidence, and hinted that men were not quite so good as they should be. I knew him to be a little inclined to melancholy, and that he considered himself as a neglected man, who had reason to complain of the world's injustice. But, though the belief that this was true moved my compassion, he did not convince me that men were constitutionally inclined to evil. My own feelings loudly spoke the contrary. I had not yet been initiated. I knew but little of those false wants by which the mind of man is perverted. The credulity of youth can only be cured by the experience of age: the prejudices of age can only be eradicated by appealing to the feelings and facts of youth. Man becomes what the mistaken institutions of society inevitably make him: his tendency is to promote his own well being, and the well being of the creatures around him; these can only be promoted by virtue; consequently, when he is vicious it is from mistake, and his original sin is ignorance.

My books, clothes, and effects were forwarded to the next market town, through which the coach that I was to travel in passed. That I might meet it in time on Monday morning, it was necessary to set out the evening before, and sleep at the inn. My mind was by no means free from popular prejudices, when they were of a moral cast, and I was not entirely satisfied at beginning my journey on a Sunday. I struggled against the nonsense of ill omens, for I had read books in which they were ridiculed; but I was not quite certain that the action was in itself right. Things however were thus arranged, and my friends were assembled to take leave of me. The lawyer's reiterated advice teased me; my mother's tears gave me pain; but the pressure of the usher's hand and his cordial 'God be with you!' went to my heart. However, the sun shone, the month was May, the grass was green, the birds were singing, my hopes were mantling, and my cares were soon forgotten. I seemed to look back on my past existence as on a kind of imprisonment; and my spirits fluttered, as if just set free to wander through a world of unknown delights.

Fortune was disposed to favour the delusive vision; for at the inn on the morrow, being roused from a sound sleep to pursue my journey, after stepping into the coach, I found myself seated opposite to the handsomest sweetest young Lady I had ever beheld. I except Olivia; but her I had only known as it were a child, and I looked back on those as on childish days. The lovely creature was clothed in a sky-blue riding-habit with embroidered button-holes, and a green hat and feather, with suitable decorations. She had a delicate twisted cane-whip in her hand, a nosegay in her bosom, and a purple cestus round her waist. There were beside two gentlemen in the coach, genteelly dressed; and they all appeared to know each other.

The young lady sopke to every body, without the least reserve or pride, which did but increase the good opinion I had conceived of her. The gentlemen likewise were easy and familiar; and, in spite of my friend the lawyer, I already plainly perceived the world was a very good humoured polite and pleasant world. The young lady was peculiarly attentive and kind to me, and, I being but a raw traveller, insisted that the gentleman next her should change places with me, that I might sit with my face toward the horses, lest I should be sick by riding backward. At this however my manly pride revolted, and I obstinately kept my seat, notwithstanding her very obliging intreaties. The phrase raw traveller I did not think quite so politely and happily chosen as the rest; but then it fell from such a pair of modest lips, that it was impossible to conceive offence.

After a pleasant ride of three hours, we arrived at the breakfasting place. The coach door was opened, and I, not waiting for the steps, leaped out like a young grey-hound. The lady seemed half inclined to follow me, but was timid. I placed myself properly, promised to catch her, and she sprang into my arms. Suddenly recollecting herself, she exclaimed, —'What a wild creature I am!' and ran away, hiding her face with her hands. I blamed myself for having been too forward, and inwardly applauded her quick sense of propriety. The gentlemen laughed, walked into the breakfasting-room, and invited me to follow them.

In about ten minutes, the young lady entered with apologies, and hoping we knew the rules of travelling too well to wait. She seemed improved in beauty. There was a kind of bloom spread over her countenance, contrasted with a deli¦cate pearl white, such as I had never seen in the finest cherry cheeks of our village maidens. 'It is the blush at the little incident of leaping from the coach, said I to myself, that has thus improved her complexion.' She sat down to the table, and, with the kindness that seemed native to her, poured out my tea, sugared and creamed it just to my taste, and handed it to me with sweetness that was quite seducing. I knew not how to return or to merit her favours, and the attempt made me mawkishly sentimental. 'It is delightful, said I, when amiable people live together in happy society.' 'It is indeed,' said she, and her bosom appeared gently to heave.

Our feelings seemed to vibrate in unison, but they were disturbed by a sudden burst of coughing of one of the gentlemen, drinking his tea; and were not much harmonized by a fit of laughing with which the other was seized, who told his companion he was a droll dog. But what the drollery could be, of a man choaked with swallowing too hastily, was more than I could comprehend. The appellation of droll dog however was repeated, till the two gentlemen could appease their titillation. I own I thought it a little rude; but they seemed neither of them so well-bred as the lady, and I concluded they could be nothing more than travelling acquaintance. I even supposed I saw them wink at each other, as if there had been something strange or improper in my behaviour.

I then thought it quite necessary to let them know who I was. Accordingly I took an opportunity of succinctly telling them whence I came, where I was going, who my relations were, and what my expectations. I let them understand that I had money in my purse, and gave broad hints that I was neither fool nor coward. They were quite civil, but still their looks to each other seemed very significant, and to have more meaning than I knew how to develope. I was a little piqued, but comforted myself with the assurance that I should show them their mistake, if they conjectured any thing to my disadvantage.

Breakfast over, we returned to the coach, and, after handing the young lady, I stepped in as lightly as I had stepped out. She again insisted I should not ride backward, and I for my former reason refused to change my place, till one of those abrupt gentlemen exclaimed.— 'What, my young buck, are you afraid of a petticoat?' 'Oh fie!' said the young lady.

Rouzed by this insulting supposition, and despising every kind of cowardice, I immediately crossed over and took my seat by her side. 'Men fellows are very rude horse-godmother kind of creatures,' said the young lady.—The colour flushed in my face.—'Men fellows? Horse-godmother?' It was strange! I was more than half afraid she meant me.— 'Not all of them I hope,' said I, as soon, as I could recollect myself—'No, not all of them,' answered the young lady, with a gentle smile, and a glance that I thought had meaning.

My flow of spirits being somewhat checked by the behaviour of the gentlemen, I sat silent, and they fell into conversation; by which I learned that one of them was a gentleman of great fortune in Wales, and the other a captain in the army, and that they were well acquainted with London, Dublin, Bath, Brighthelmstone, and all places of fashionable resort. The young lady too had not only been at each of them, but had visited Paris, and mentioned many persons of quality, with whom, as it appeared from her discourse, she was quite familiar. It was evident, from all she said, that she knew how to distinguish the well bred and the polite. She was immensely shocked at any thing that was ungenteel and low: it was prodigiously horrid. The whole discourse indeed convinced me that they were all people of consequence; and that my supposition of ill breeding on the part of the gentlemen must have been hasty.

One thing however surprised me, and particularly drew my attention. I valued myself on my knowledge of languages, and the quickness of my ear; yet, though they continually spoke English, they introduced occasional words and phrases which to me were wholly unintelligible▪ One especially of these phrases seemed so strange that I repeated it to myself again and again. It was—The kinchin will bite the bubble—I pondered, and fifty times questioned—'Who is the kinchin? What is bite the bubble? But in vain: it was incomprehensible!

We did not stop to dine till between four and five o'clock, and then the young lady at alighting was more circumspect. She having retired, the gentlemen asked me if I would take a turn to the river side, at the back of the inn; and I, to shew that I now understood their characters better, willingly complied. As I was following them, the landlord, who had attended while we were alighting, plucked me by the skirt, and looking significantly after my companions whispered—'Take care of yourself, young gentleman!' then hastily brushed by. The first moment I thought it strange; the second I exclaimed to myself—'Ah, ha! I guessed how it was: I soon found them out! But, if they have any tricks to play, they shall find I am as cunning as they. The landlord need not have cautioned me; I am not so easily caught.'

Thus fortified, I proceeded boldy; and we had not walked two hundred yards before one of them who had stepped forward, stooped and picked up a piece of paper, which he instantly began to read▪ 'S'death!' exclaimed he, as we approached, 'here is a bill, at three days sight, for fifteen guineas; drawn on Fairlamb and Company, bankers at Oxford. You are acquainted with country bills, captain,' said he, presenting it to his companion: 'do you think it a good one?' His companion took it, examined it, upside and down, to the light and from it, and replied—'As good as the bank! But we must share?' 'To be sure we must,' said the finder. 'Why should you doubt it? 'Tis a trifle; five guineas a piece; but it will serve to pay travelling expences.'

They laughed, and I was staggered at this honourable and generous conduct. I have proceeded too hastily, thought I; and the landlord is own cousin to our lawyer; he thinks every man a rogue. Their liberality is proof sufficient in their favour.—'Come, give us our five guineas a piece,' said the gentleman of Wales to the captain—'I have no ready cash,' answered he. 'I never chuse, when I am travelling, to have more money in my pocket than barely enough for expences.' —'That is exactly my case,' replied the Welsh gentleman. 'But perhaps our young friend may be less cautious, and may have loose cash sufficient.'—'I had twelve guineas,' said I, 'when I left home.' —'Oh, that will just do,' answered the captain. 'We turn off to-morrow morning for Cirencester; you are going to Oxford, otherwise our luck would have been lost upon us, for we would not have gone a mile out of our road for such a trifle.'

My hand was in my pocket, and the guineas were between my fingers, when my heart smote me. The landlord's significant 'Take care of yourself young gentleman!' my own sagacious conjectures when he gave me this warning, and their strange phrase of bite the bubble, all rose to my recollection. They shall not make a tool and a jest of me, said I to myself.

The gentleman of Wales seeing me hesitate, jogged me by the elbow, and said—'Come, come; we must dispatch: dinner is on the table by this time, and the coach will not wait a minute.'— 'Those who think me a fool,' replied I, with something of indignation in my countenance, 'will find themselves deceived'—'What do you mean by that, Sir,' retorted the captain—'Strange language, for a gentleman!'

I stopped a moment: my conscience smote me. If I should mistake the character of these gentlemen, thought I, my behaviour will appear contemptible— 'Do you mean to insult us?' said the gentleman of Wales.—The captain once more saw my hand in my pocket: I caught his eye; he winked to his companion and said, 'No, no; the young gentleman knows better.'—Yes,' answered I, instantly fired; 'I know better than to give my money to sharpers'—'Sharpers!' retorted one—'Sharpers!' reechoed the other, and began mutually to hustle me—My valour was roused: I faced about, with the first blow laid the gentleman of Wales sprawling, and with the second made the captain's eyes strike fire. The attack was infinitely more vigorous and powerful than they could have expected. The Welsh gentleman shook his ears; the captain clapped his white handkerchief to his eyes. They swore a few oaths in concert, but neither of them seemed desirous to continue the combat. Such an attack from a stripling was quite out of all calculation. If however I could guess their motives from their manner, they were rather those of caution than of cowardice. Be that as it will, I could better deal out hard blows than utter coarse expressions, and I left them with a look of contempt.

Entering the dinner room, I found the young lady and told her the story. She was all astonishment! Could not believe her ears! Was never so deceived in her life! Was immensely glad that she now knew her company! She had seen them at Bath, and had imagined them to be, as they professed themselves, gentlemen: but people do not know who and who are together at such public places! She was sorry to ride in the same carriage with them; but dine with them she would not. I asked if I might be permitted that honour; and she readily replied, 'Certainly, Sir: you are a gentleman.'

Proud to be thus distinguished, after dinner, I insisted on paying the bill, and she still more strenuously insisted I should not. She pulled out her purse, which seemed well filled, and put down her quota, which no entreaties could prevail on her to take back. It was her rule.

The horses being ready, we were summoned to our seats, which we took in pairs: the gentleman of Wales and the captain sitting in sullen silence, and the young lady not deigning to address a word to them.

At night we again paired off, and I was admitted to be her companion at supper; she continuing to treat me, since their detection, with a marked partiality.

Supper being over and the lady, unfortunately as she said for her, being to travel the Cirencester road with those odious sharpers, I was again exceedingly desirous to shew some trifling mark of respect, by discharging the bill; which she again peremptorily refused to accept. Unluckily however, going to draw her purse as before, she could not find it!—'It was exceedingly strange!—Infinitely distressing! What could have become of it? Thirty guineas were but a trifle, but to lose them at such a moment was very tormenting!'—She felt again, and having no better success her features assumed a very dismal and tragical cast.

None but a heart of stone could endure, unmoved, the anxiety and distress of so kind, so amiable, and so lovely a creature. I took my eleven guineas, my whole store except a few shillings, told her it was all I had, but intreated she would not put me to the pain of refusing the little supply I had to afford.

She thanked me infinitely; recollected she had left her purse when she retired after dinner to comb up her dishevelled hair, having taken it out with the comb and totally forgotten it; repeated that she was proceeding to London, for which a single guinea would perhaps be sufficient; but unfortunately she was obliged to pass through Cirencester, having a poor relation there, that was sick and in absolute want, and to whom she had promised an immediate relief of ten guineas, with an intention of further support. However she could not think of accepting my offer: it had so strange an appearance! And she would rather suffer any thing than forfeit the good opinion of a gentleman: especially after having conversed with those good for nothing men as if acquainted with them, but of whom she knew nothing, and had therefore supposed no harm.

The debate was long, and managed on both sides with almost equal ardour. At length however I prevailed on her to take ten of the eleven guineas; but not till she had given me a draft on her banker, Signed Harriet Palmer, which she assured me would be honoured the instant it should be presented. I took it to satisfy her scruples, but I had read the old romances, and too well understood the gallantry due from a gentleman to a lady, to think of putting it to the use she intended. I lingered and knew not how to take leave; but the coach would only allow her three hours repose, I therefore reluctantly bade her good night, and we parted with mutual admiration; hoping for some fortunate opportunity of renewing our acquaintance.

CHAP. XIV.

MORNING THOUGHTS: CONJECTURES AND EXPECTATIONS. A SPECIMEN OF OXFORD MANNERS, BEING ANOTHER NEW LESSON.

LEFT by myself on the morrow, and revolving in my mind the events of the preceding day, I had occasional doubts, which had I suffered them to prevail, would have been exceedingly mortifying. The young lady was certainly a beautiful lady: was modest too, and well bred. I had seen nothing to impeach her virtue: on the contrary, it had been the principal topic of our discourse. 'Tis true I had, as became me, been too respectful to put her chastity to any proof. I was not so discourteous a knight.

But then, that she should have been so intimate as she appeared to be with those gentlemen sharpers, that she should be going the same road, that she should lose her purse in so odd a manner, and that she should accept my ten guineas, were circumstances that dwelt irksomely upon my mind. Yet it was totally improbable that so sweet a young creature should be trammeled in vice. What! be the companion of such men, relate a string of falsehoods, give a forged draft on a banker, and even shed tears at distress which, if it were not real, was a most base and odious artifice? That she could act so cunning and so vile a part, and I not detect her, was wholly incredible. I was very unwilling to imagine I could be so imposed upon, so duped. A raw traveller? If so, raw indeed! Of all suppositions, that was the most humiliating. I endeavoured but in vain to banish suspicion. In fine, whatever might be the cause, which I could not very well develope, I sound the soliloquies of the morning by no means so fascinating as the visions of the preceding evening.

Wearied of this subject, I turned my thoughts into a new channel, and endeavoured to conjecture what Oxford was, and what kind of people were its inhabitants. I had heard it described, and remembered the leading features; its expansive streets, aspiring turrets, noble buildings, and delightful walks. The picture rose to magnificence; but the wisdom learning and virtue of its sages, and their pupils, were still more sublime. High minded and noble youths, thirsting after knowledge, assembled under the auspices of philosophers whose science was profound, and whose morals were pure. The whole fabric rising in beautiful order: under-graduates, bachelors, masters, doctors, professors, presidents, heads of colleges, high stewards, and chancellors, each excelling the other in worth as in dignity! Their manners engaging, their actions unblemished, and their lives spent in the delightful regions of learning and truth. It must be the city of angels, and I was hastening to reside among the blest! A band of seers, living in fraternity, governed by one universal spirit of benevolence, harmonized by one vibrating system of goodness celestial! Among such beings evil and foolish men could find no admittance, for they could find no society.

Theology too would here be seen in all her splendour; active energetic and consolatory; not disturbed by doubt, not disgraced by acrimony, not slumbering in sloth, not bloated with pride, not dogmatical, not intolerant, not rancorous, not persecuting, not inquisitorial; but diffusing her mild yet clear and penetrating beams through the soul, where all could not but be light and life and love! —Oh Oxford, said I, thou art the seat of the muses, thou art the nurse of wisdom, thou art the mother of virtue! —I own my expectations were high.

My reveries concerning my old companion, Hector, were in the same tone. I had heard that he had often been down at Mowbray Hall, during vacation time; but the mutual interdiction of our families had prevented our meeting. He cannot but be greatly altered, said I. It is impossible he should have remained so long in this noble seminary, and continue the same selfish, sensual, and half-brutal Hector Mowbray, whom formerly I knew. I regretted our quarrel: he might now have become an agreeable companion, perhaps a friend. Olivia, too?— She had a sister's partiality for him before; she might now love him infinitely, and justly.

While I sat ruminating, the coach continued rolling onward over hill and dale, passing house hedge row and heath, till the towers and turrets of Oxford came in view. My heart bounded at the sight, and active fancy industriously continued her fictions. We entered the city and drove clattering along to one of the principal inns.

The moment the coachman pulled up, I stepped out of the carriage and into the street. It was the eve of a new term; the gownsmen were swarming, carriages and horsmen post haste were arriving, the bells were ringing, waiters and footmen were hurrying to and fro, and all was dazzle, all was life. Eager to mingle in the scene, I walked up and down the high street, saw college after college, hall after hall, and church after church. The arches the pillars the quadrangles rose in incessant and astonishing succession. My eyes turned from building to building, gazing with avidity, adding wonder to wonder, and filling the mind with rapture. 'It is all that I had imagined,' said I, 'and much much more! Happy city, happy people, and happy I, that am come to be one among you! Now and now only I begin to live.'

Fearful of bewildering myself in this fairy land, I turned back to the inn, but continued gazing with new amazement at every step. Just as I came to the gate, I heard the galloping of horses behind me, looked round, and there most unexpectedly saw Hector Mowbray, pulling up his horse, with two livery servants, three grey-hounds, and a brace of pointers at his heels! He had new boots, buckskin breeches, a buff waist-coat, a scarlet coat with a green collar, and a gold button and loop, tassel, and hat-band. I was within a yard of him when he alighted. 'Bless me,' said I, 'Mr. Mowbray?'—'G—d—my blood! Trevor! Is it you?'

The apostrophe startled me.

Hector gave three loud cracks with his whip, whistled his dogs, and with a Stentor voice called after one of his servants— 'Why holloa! You blind blood of a w—! Why Sam! G— shiver your soul, what are you about? Uncouple Jerry Sneak and Jowler, and give limping Jenny's ear a 'nointing—D— my body, Trevor, I'm glad to see you! When did you arrive? How did you come? In stile; a chaise and four; smoking the road; raising a mist?'—I was ashamed of my stage-coach vehicle and was silent.—'What, my buck, are you to be one of us?'—'I am'—'D—my b— that's right—Jack Singleton! Jack! G— blunder your body! Why don't you answer, you shamble shanked beggar's baby? Go to the Bursar, and tell him to send supper for six and claret for sixteen; served up to a minute. Do you hear?—D— my body, I'm glad to see you! We'll make a night ont! What, are you come to enter at our college?'— 'Yes'—'D— my soul, I'm glad ont! D—n me, our college will be the go! D—n me, we are a rare string already! D—n me, we shall beat them all hollow, D—n me, now you're come, d—n me: we shall, d—n me!—Holloa! Sam! Run, you blood of a w—! yonder's Lord Sad-dog turning the corner in his phaeton, four in hand: scamper away and tell him, d—n me, he must sup with me to night. Tell him by G— he must; he and the jolly dog his tutor. Tell him we have a new comer, a friend, a freshman, piping hot, d—n me, from our village; and that we must make him free of Oxford to night, d—n me. Do you hear?'

Astound, breathless, thunder-struck, at this intolerable profaneness, I stood like an idiot, unable to speak or think. Hector took hold of my arm and dragged me along. I obeyed, for I was insensible, soul-less; and even when the return of thought came, it was all confusion. Was this Oxford? Were these its manners? Were such its inhabitants? Oaths twenty in a breath, unmeaning vulgar oaths; ribaldry, such as till that hour I had never heard!

What could I do? I was a stranger. Were they all equally depraved, and equally contemptible?—That, said I to myself, is what I wish to know, and I suffered him to lead me wherever he pleased.

He took me to inns coffee-houses and halls, to call on one companion and beat up for another. I saw the buildings; the architecture doubtless was the same, but the scene was changed! The beauties of Oxford were vanished! I was awakened from the most delightful of dreams to a disgusting reality, and would have given kingdoms to have once more renewed my trance. The friends of Hector, though not all of them his equals in turbulence profaneness and folly, were of the same school. Their language, though less coarse, was equally insipid. Their manners, when not so obtrusive, were more bald. They all cursed blustered and behaved with insolence in proportion to the money they spent, or the time they had been at the university. The chief difference was that those who were less rich and less hardened than he had less spirit: that is, had less noise nonsense and swagger. But, though the scene was not what I expected, it was new, and in a certain sense enlivening, and my flowing spirits were soon at their accustomed height.

The president had been written to and I was expected at college, where, when we came and my arrival was announced, I found an apartment prepared for my reception. Passing through the common room, I saw a face which I thought I recollected. 'Is not that Turl?' said I to Hector—'Pshaw, d—n me, take no notice of such a raff,' replied he, and stalked away. I was too ignorant of college cant, at that time, to know that raff was the term of contempt for poverty.

As we passed through the quadrangle, the president, entering the gate, saw Hector in his scarlet green and gold, and without his gown and cap, and beckoned to him. Hector, to evade as I afterward learned what he expected, introduced me. The president eyed me for a moment, received me graciously, and desired me to call on him in the morning. He then asked Mowbray why he left his chamber in that dress, and without his gown? Hector answered he had only arrived the day before, had been to take a ride, and had mislaid his cap, which was not to be found; but he had a new one coming home in the morning. The president, after saying—'Well, Sir, I request I may not meet you in this manner again,' passed on. The story of the cap mislaid was a direct falsehood: the old and new cap were both in his chamber, for he had been trying them on and asking me which looked the best. Hector winked his eye, lolled his tongue, and said to me —'That's the way, d—n me, to hum the old ones.'

Supper time presently came, and Hector and his companions were assembled. Beside Lord Sad-dog and his tutor, there was a senior fellow, and a master of arts, all of our college and all of them the prime bucks of the place. My late high expectations of learning and virtue were entirely forgotten. There was novelty in every word they uttered; and I listened to their conversation with the most attentive ardour. Nor did I feel astonishment to hear that dogs, horses, gluttony, drunkenness, and debauchery were the grand blessings of life: Hector had prepared me to hear any thing with but little surprise. The Lord and the Squire gloried in braving and breaking the statutes of the college and the university; the tutor, fellow, and master of arts in eluding them. The history they gave of themselves was, that the former could ride, drive, swear, kick scoundrels, bilk prostitutes, commit adultery, and breed riots: the latter could cant, lie, act the hypocrite, hum the proctors, and protect their companions in debauchery: in gluttony drunkenness and libidinous thoughts they were all avowed rivals.

Hector, descending to trifling vices, vaunted of having been five times in one week imposed (that is, reprimanded by set tasks) for having neglected lectures and prayers, and worn scarlet, green and gold; while the more heroic Lord Sad-dog told how he had been twice privately rusticated, for an amour with the bar-maid of a coffee-house, whom he dared the vice-chancellor himself to banish the city. Fearful of being surpassed, they exaggerated their own wickedness, and often imputed crimes to themselves which they had neither the opportunity nor the courage to commit

That I might appear worthy of the choice group among whom I was admited, Hector, by relating in a distorted manner things that had happened, but attributing to me such motives as he imagined he should have been actuated by had he been the agent, told various falsehoods of my exploits. I had too great a mixture of sheepishness and vanity to contradict him in such honourable society, and therefore accepted praise at which I ought to have blushed.

During supper, while they were all gormandizing and encouraging me to do the same, his lordship, addressing his tutor, asked—'D—n me, Jack, can you tell me why it was I took you into my pay? What the d-mn-t—n are you good for?'—'Tell you? To be sure I can! You will not pretend that, when you first came under my tuition, you were the man you now are? Who taught you to laugh at doctors, bully proctors, stare the vice chancellor out of countenance, and parade the streets of a Sunday in sermon time but I?'—'You!'—'Yes! I!— 'D—n my body, well said, Jack!' roared Hector.' 'D—n me you are a good one! Go it! Keep it up! D—n me go it!' The tutor continued—

'Of whom did you learn to scout the gownsmen, cudgel the townsmen, kiss their wives, frighten their daughters, and debauch their maids but I? You were a mere tyro when I took you in hand; you did not so much as know how to throw in a knock down blow!'—'Why you lying son of a—'

I must not repeat his lordship's reply, or the continuation of the dialogue; it was too gross to be read or written. I only intend the above as a short specimen of what lords' private tutors at universities sometimes are, and of the learning which their pupils sometimes acquire.

While at supper, I was continually plied to drink; each pledging me in turn; their intention being, as Hector had declared, to make me free: that is, as drunk as possible. I had not the courage to incur their ridicule by refusing my glass. Beside my spirits were raised, and my appetite, which travelling had increased, was good. My constitution too was strong; for it had been confirmed by exercise and a cheerful mind, and never injured by excess. For these reasons I stood their attacks far beyond their expectation, and my manhood received no little applause.

The night advanced, and they grew riotous. The lord and his tutor were for sporting the door of a glum: that is, breaking into the chamber of a gownsman who loves study. Hector vociferously seconded the motion, but the fellow and the master of arts cunningly endeavoured to keep them quiet, first by persuasion, and, when that was ineffectual, by affirming the students they proposed to attack sported oak: in plain English, barred up their doors. Had they been without the walls of the college, there would have been a riot; but, having no other ventilator for their magnanimity, they fell with redoubled fury to drinking, and the jolly tutor proposed a rummer round—'D—n me,' said Hector, 'that's a famous thought! But you are a famous deep one, d—n me!'

The rummers were seized, the wine poured out, and his lordship began with —'D-mn-t—n to the flincher.' Who should that be? I, the freshman? Oh, no! For that night, I was too far gone in good fellowship.

This was the finishing blow to three of us. Hector fell on the floor; his lordship sunk in his chair; and I, after a hurrah and a hiccup, began to cast the cat: an Oxford phrase for what usually happens to a man after taking an emetic. Happily I had not far to go, and the fellow and the master of arts had just sense enough left to help me to my chamber, where at day light next morning I found myself, on the hearth, with my head resting against the fender, the pain of which awakened me.

CHAP. XV.

MORNING REFLECTIONS: THE ADVICE OF A YOUTH AND THE CAUTION OF A GRAVE SENIOR: ANOTHER RENCONTRE.

DISCOVERING myself in this condition, recollecting the scene in which I had so lately been an actor, and feeling my stomach and head disordered and my whole frame burning with the debauch, looking round too and seeing myself in a room where every object reminded me that I was a stranger, and that the eyes of many strangers were upon me and my conduct, I found but little cause of satisfaction, either in myself, the acquaintance I had made, or the place to which I had come.

The more I reflected the more was my mind disturbed. I walked about the chamber unable to rid myself either of my sickly qualms, the feverish distemper of my blood, or the still more fevered distemperature of my mind. It was a violent but I suspect it was a useful lesson. After a while, cold water, washing, cleaning, and shifting my dress, gave me a little relief.

The air I thought would be refreshing; but, as I opened the door to descend the stairs, Turl was passing, and very kindly inquired after my health, said he was happy to see me, and asked if I were come to ent•r myself at the college. Neglecting, or rather at that moment despising, Hector and his caution, I answered in the same tone and invited him into my room.

Too much ashamed to avow the debauch of which I had been guilty, or the painful feelings that were the result, I endeavoured by questions to gain the information which might best appease my roused curiosity. 'I am but just arrived,' said I: 'will you be kind enough to give me such intelligence as may aid me to regulate my conduct? What I have hitherto seen has rather surprized and even disappointed me. I hoped for perfection which I begin to doubt I shall not find. What are the manners of the place?'— 'Such as must be expected from a multitude of youths, who are ashamed to be thought boys, and who do not know how to behave like men.'—'But are there not people appointed to teach them?—'No.' —'What is the office of the proctors, heads of houses, deans, and other superintendants, of whom I have heard?'—'To watch and regulate the tufts of caps, the tying of bands, the stuff and tassels of which gowns are made: to reprimand those who wear red, or green, and to take care that the gownsmen assemble, at proper hours, to hear prayers gabbled over as fast as tongue can give them utterance, or lectures at which both reader and hearers fall asleep.' 'What are the public rewards for proficiency in learning?' —'Few, or in reality none.'—'Beside numerous offices, are not exhibitions, fellowships, professors chairs, and presentations bestowed?'—'Yes, on those who have municipal or political influence; or who by servility and effrontery can court patronage.'—'Surely you have some men of worth and genius, who meet their due reward?'—'Few; very few, indeed. Sloth, inanity, and bloated pride are here too often the characteristics of office. Fastidiousness is virtue, and to keep the poor and unprotected in awe a duty. The rich indeed are indulged in all the licentious liberties they can desire.'— 'Why do so many young men of family resort hither?'—'Some to get what is to be given away; others are sent by their parents, who imagine the place to be the reverse of what it is; and a third set, intended for the church, are obliged to go to a university before they can be admited into holy orders.'—'That rule I have heard is not absolute.'—'It is supposed here to be little less.'—'Then you would not advise a young person to come to this city to complete his education?'—'If he possess extraordinary fortitude and virtue, yes: if not, I would have him avoid Oxford as he would contagion.'—'What are its advantages, to the former?'— 'Leisure, books, and learned men; and the last benefit would be the greatest, were it not publicly discountenanced by the arrogant distance which both the statutes of the university and the practice of the graduates and dignitaries prescribe. In my opinion, it has another paradoxical kind of advantage: to a mind properly prepared, the very vice of the place, by shewing how hateful it is, must be healthful. Insolence, haughtiness, sloth, and sensuality, daily exhibited, if truly seen, cannot but excite contempt.'—'You seem to have profited by the lesson'— 'Oh! there is but little merit in my forbearance. I am poor, and have not the means. I am a servitor and despised, or overlooked. Those are most exposed to danger who have most money and most credit; I have neither.' Charmed with his candour, our conversation continued: he directed me in the college modes, and I sent to the Bursar, and prevailed on Turl to breakfast with me. I understood that he had obtained an exhibition, but that, having expressed his thoughts too freely on certain speculative points, he had incurred the disapprobation of his seniors, who considered it as exceedingly impertinent in any man to differ with them in opinion, and especially in such a youth.

It was now time I should visit the president, and we parted. This college magistrate had formerly been acquainted with my grandfather, and I had strong recommendations to him from my native village: he therefore laid aside much of his dignity, and questioned me on various subjects. He took but little notice of the reading and knowledge I was ambitious to display, but gave me much advice and instruction, concerning the college and university discipline, necessary to be observed, which he very seriously admonished me not to neglect.

I endeavoured to find what his opinion concerning Hector Mowbray was, and the lord to whom I had been introduced; but this he evaded, with a caution to me however not to indulge in any imprudent expence.

I then mentioned the name of Turl, at which he seemed instantly alarmed, and replied, 'he should be exceedingly sorry if Mr. Turl were one of my acquaintance. He was a very dangerous young man, and had dared not only to entertain but to make known some very heterodox opinions. He had even proceeded so far as to declare himself an anti-trinitarian, and should therefore certainly never receive his countenance; neither he nor any of his connections. If he escaped expulsion, he would assuredly never obtain his degrees.' I was too orthodox myself not to be startled at this intelligence, and felt a very severe pang that a young man, from whose conversation I had hoped so much, should hold such reprobate doctrines. I had thought he would prove both an instructive and pleasant companion, but I now positively determined to shun his society. Of this I informed the president, and he highly applauded my resolution.

I then proceeded to the ceremony of entering myself of the college, and took the oaths: that is, I subscribed to the thirty-nine articles, took an oath of allegiance and supremacy, an oath to observe the statutes of the university, and another to obey every thing that was contained in a certain huge statute book of the college, brought out on this occasion, which I never saw either before or since. To this hour, what its contents were is a thing to me unknown. What is still more strange, the very persons who oblige you to take these statute-book oaths publickly confess that to obey most of them is impossible. They relate to obsolete customs, the very means of practising which are wanting. Some for example swear to have mass said for the soul of the founder of the college; and others, though men of good estates, swear themselves not worth five pounds per annum. Of these particulars however I was ignorant, and the whole was hurried over so much in the way of form, and without inquiry of any kind, that it seemed like the mere dictate of good manners to do what I was bidden.

Warned by the information which Turl had communicated, and disgusted by what I myself had seen and partaken of, I industriously for sometime avoided Hector Mowbray, who as it happened was too much engaged in his own pursuits to molest me. In about three weeks however he came to me one morning, rallied me in his coarse way, asked if I had entered myself of the glums, and insisted that I should go with him and take a ride to Abingdon. The chaise would be ready in half an hour, and he would introduce me to the finest girl in all England. Thinking his language equivocal and suspecting his intentions, I ventured to ask if she were a modest woman? He burst into a loud laugh and exclaimed (I shall omit his oaths) 'Modest! to be sure! as modest as any of her sex.' This did not satisfy me; I continued to interrogate and he to laugh, but still swearing there was not a modester woman in all England. A strong inclination to take exercise, my own active curiosity, and the boisterous hawling and obstinacy of Hector at length prevailed, and I yielded. I walked with him to the inn, the chaise was ready, and we stepped into it and galloped away.

As we were driving on, the image of the gentle Olivia rose to my recollection. Instantly the thought struck me, 'If it should be! Why not? Who else could it be? Oh, it must! Yes, yes!' I was soon convinced it could be no other than Olivia! the dear the divine Olivia!

In less than forty minutes we were at Abingdon, and the postillion by Hector's direction drove us on the back of the town till we came to a neat newly painted house, at which he was ordered to stop. My heart began to beat. Hector jumped out and thundered at the door. A female threw up the sash, looked through the window, and instantly drew it down again. Alas! it was not Olivia.

There was some delay: the impatient Hector cursed and knocked again, and in a little while the door was opened.

Hector entered swearing, hurried up stairs, bad me follow him, dashed open the door, and a young lady, in a sky-blue riding-habit, with embroidered buttonholes, a nosegay in her bosom, and a purple cestus round her waist—leaped into his arms!—I stood in a trance! It was she herself! That sweet lovely creature, who had lost her purse, given a draft on her banker, and gone to relieve a poor sick relation at Cirencester! It was the true and identical Harriet Palmer! She that had been so attentive to me; had sugared my tea, suffered me to sup in her company, and been so fearful lest I should be sick by riding backward! The innocent soul, that had felt her delicacy so much disturbed by the horse-godmother rudeness of the men-fellows!—'Bless me!' said I.

She had not time to attend to me. 'What the d-mn-t-n is the matter?' said Hector. 'Why was not I let in? Who have you here?'—'Here!' answered the sweet creature. 'How can you suppose I have any body here?'

There was a watch studded with diamonds lying on the sofa; it caught the eye of Mowbray; he snatched it up, and with a volley of oaths asked—'Whose watch is this?'—'Mine!' said Harriet. Hector looked again. 'Yours? Set with diamonds? A man's gold chain? Here's the seal of Lord Sad-dog! His arms engraved on it! I thought I saw one of his fellows, as we turned the corner!'

There was another door, to an inner chamber; to that Hector, with all his force, applied his foot. A loud laugh was heard within, the door opened, and out came Lord Sad-dog in propria persona.

Miss Palmer, not knowing what better to do, joined his lordship in the forced laugh. The surly Hector shewed every propensity to brutal revenge, but had only the courage to bully; in which art the lord and the lady soon shewed they were as great proficients as himself.

As for the feelings of the blooming Harriet and me, they were reciprocal; we were equally averse to acknowledge each other for acquaintance. I did not wish to be proclaimed the dupe of a courtezan, nor she to pay back the ten guineas, or be sued for a fraud. Hector was in no humour to stay, and we soon returned to Oxford; I ruminating and even laughing, now at myself, now at him; he in high dudgeon, and finding his choler and his courage increase in proportion as he was driven farther from danger.

CHAP. XVI.

EDUCATION STILL PROGRESSIVE: A WIDOW'S CONTINENCE: RELIGIOUS FERVOUR: A METHODIST SERMON: OLIVIA IN DANGER: LOVE DREAMS: FANATIC HORRORS: PRESENT DISGRACE, AND HONOURS DELAYED.

DURING the short period of my absence from my native home, I had been taught two additional and essential lessons: the first, that men are not all as good as they might be; and the second, that I was not quite so wise as I had supposed myself. Having once been duped, the thought occurred that it was possible I might be duped again, and I thus acquired some small degree of what is called worldly caution. At once to display one vice and teach another, to expose fraud and inspire suspicion, is, to an unadulterated mind, a severe and odious lesson; and, when repeated too often, is in danger of inculcating a mistake infinitely more pernicious than that of credulity; that is, a conviction that man is depraved by nature, and a total forgetfulness that he is merely the creature of habit and accident.

Hitherto I had met disappointment; but I had found novelty; and though it was not the novelty I expected, yet it was invigorating: it kept me awake. The qualities for which I most valued myself no one indeed seemed to notice. But the world was before me; I had seen but little of it; my own feelings assured me genius and virtue had a real existence, and sometime or another I should find them.

Among consolatory thoughts, the most animating was the recollection of what Turl had said, that, to the possessor of fortitude and virtue, Oxford was a place where study might be most advantageously prosecuted; and, aided by this cheering hope, I applied myself to books with courage and assiduity.

On the subject of reading however my mind had strong contentions with itself: poetry, and the belles lettres, Homer, Horace, Virgil, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Tasso, Ariosto, Racine, Moliere, Congreve, with a long and countless et caetera, were continually tempting me to quit the barren pursuits of divinity and law, for the study of which I had come to Oxford. Yet a sense of duty so far prevailed that I went through a course of the fathers, pored over the canonists, and made many resolute attacks upon the schoolmen. Not only Aristotle but his doctors, the irrefragable, the angelic or eagle-eyed, the subtile, the illuminated, and many more had their peaceful folios vainly disturbed by my researches, and my determination to understand what, alas, in its essence was unintelligible.

In the very beginning as it were of these labours an event took place, which gave a very serious aspect to my future fortunes, though, except the first emotions of regret chagrin and surprise at my mother's conduct, no present uneasiness to me. In despite of his law-suits, my grandfather had left considerable property; which it was supposed would descend to me. It had indeed the disadvantage of being left under the executorship of a lawyer, who represented it to be in a very involved and disorderly state: for, with respect to my mother, though she had immediate possession, she declared that, agreeably to the intention of the rector, her own subsistence excepted, she held it only for my use. Thus, in several of her letters, she had affectionately pressed me not to deprive myself of what was necessary to my situation, to the appearance of a gentleman, or to the support of the family character.

For the first two months we punctually wrote to each other once a week. 'My dear dear Hugh' was the first phrase in all her letters; and 'my kind and good mother' in mine: every maternal anxiety was expressed by her, and by me every return of filial affection and duty.

At length a week came in which I received no letter. I was alarmed, wrote to express my fears, and in a few days was answered, by the lawyer, that my mother was in good health, but was from home on a visit.

A month longer passed away in silence, at the end of which I wrote to my mother, expressing my feelings and fears, and requesting an answer under her own hand; otherwise I should come myself to see what was the matter.

The answer arrived, I hastily opened it, and began to read. It was no longer prefaced with 'my dear dear Hugh:' it was what follows.

Dear Son,

You seem impatient to hear from me, and so I sit down to write you an account of something that has happened, which perhaps you will think well of; I hope you will; I am sure you have no reason to think otherwise; though, when one does things all for the best, one is not always best thought of. But I dare say you will not think ill of your mother, for that would not be dutiful, nor at all agreeable to what your poor dear grandfather always taught. Nobody can suppose that I am not come to years of discretion; and you very well know I have always been a good and tender mother to you; and so I always shall be; and I am sure you will not think hardly and improperly of my conduct in any way, for that would be very unkind and unbecoming; and, if I have done all for the best, to be hardly thought of afterward would be very improper indeed. Mr. Thornby [the lawyer] is a very prudent man, and so I have acted by his advice, which you may well think cannot be wrong; and his nephew, Mr. Wakefield, is a gentleman that nobody need be ashamed of owning; and so, since you must be told, you may as well be told at first as at last—I am married; which I hope and expect you will think was a very prudent thing. I am sure when you come to know Mr. Wakefield you will like him prodigiously. He sends his kind blessing to you, and so I remain

your ever loving mother JANE WAKEFIELD.

Little as I was attached to personal interest or fearful of being left without a provision, I own this letter electrified me. Was this the tone of affection? Had it vanished so instantly? After such strong and reiterated professions for my sake never to have a second husband, not only to marry but to cool intirely toward me, and to be only anxious, in a poor selfish circumlocutory apology, for a conduct which she herself felt to be highly reprehensible!

The lawyer too! His nephew? Not satisfied with the executorship, he had engulphed the whole in his family; the stipend of a hundred a year while I remained at college, and a thousand pounds for the purchase of an advowson when. I should leave it, excepted. I wondered, on reflection, that he should even have advised the rector to this: but it was by affecting disinterestedness that he could most effectually secure the remainder.

But the pain these thoughts occasioned was neither debilitating nor durable. My sanguine self-confidence, though sometimes apalled, has all my life prevented me from being subject to fits of permanent chagrin, or melancholy. The recollection of my mother's passionate promises, the shortness of the time, the suddenness of the change, the family into which she had married, and the instability of a woman that was my mother, drew a few sighs from me, and in these my gloom evaporated. I returned cheerfully to my books and determined to visit home no more, but while a student to make Oxford my home, and not incur the frequently well-merited reproach of being a term-trotter.

As for my companion, Hector, whatever the intentions of the Squire his father might be, he considered Oxford only as a place of dissipation, and loved it for nothing but because he was here first let entirely loose, and here first found comrades that were worthy to be his peers. Most of his time was now spent in London, or in parties such as himself and his intimates planned. I suffered little interruption from him: he now and then indeed gave me an indolent call; but, as there was no parity of pursuit, nor unity of sentiment between us, there could be but little intercourse.

Little farther remarkable happened during the three years and ten months of my residence in this city, except the incident that occasioned my removal. By being a constant spectator of the debauchery of the young, and the sensuality of the old, I conceived an increasing dislike of their manners, and sought the company of a few secluded young men, who like myself were severe students. Toward the close of this period I became acquainted with some who were tinged with methodism; and, by frequently listening to their conversation, my thoughts were turned into the same channel. The want of zeal in prayer and every part of religious duty, the tedious and dull sermons heard in the churches, and what methodists call preaching themselves and not their Saviour, were the frequent topics of our animadversion.

This was a doctrine most aptly calculated to inflame an imagination like mine, which was ardent and enthusiastic. Beside it relieved me from a multitude of labours and cares, for, as I proceeded, Thomas Aquinas and his subtilizing competitors were thrown by in contempt. I had learned divinity by inspiration, and soon believed myself fit for a reformer. The philosopher Aristotle with his dialectics and sophisms were exchanged, for those of the philosopher Saint Paul; from whom I learnt that he who had saving faith had every thing, and that he who wanted it was naked of all excellence as the new born babe. This nakedness I had discovered in myself, and in the language of the sect was immediately clothed in the righteousness of Christ Jesus! I, in common with my methodistical brethren, was chosen of the elect! My name was inscribed in the book of life never to be erased! My sins were washed away! Satan had no power over me; and to myself and my new fraternity I applied the text, that 'the gates of hell could not prevail against us!'

To these mysteries, which all the initiated allow are suddenly unfolded, descending like lightening by the inspiration of the spirit and illuminating the darkened soul, to these mysteries no man perhaps was ever a more sudden or a more combustible kind of convert than myself. I beamed with gospel light; it shone through me. I was the beacon of this latter age: a comet, sent to warn the wicked. I mean, I was all this in my own imagination, which swelled and mounted to the very acme of fanaticism.

Under the impulse of these wild dreams, in which my soul delighted, I was sometimes tempted to rise up a prophet, preach salvation to the poor, and confound the wise. Persecution I must expect, but in that I should glory: it was the badge of blessedness, the mark of election, the signing of the covenant. Elevated to these celestial heights, with what contempt did I look down on the doctors, proctors, and preachers of Baal (for such were all the unenlightened) and on their dignities, paraphernalia, and many coloured robes. What were these but the types of Babylon? the ensigns of the scarlet whore? the purple tokens of the beast? In the most extravagant eccentricities of mind it is remarkable what a mixture there is of truth and falsehood, and how nearly and frequently they approach each other.

During the height of this paroxysm, a famous gospel preacher, a divine man, on his way from Shropshire to London, came to hold forth in the vicinity of Oxford: not in churches, they were shut upon him, but in the fields; not to the rich, not to the worldly wise, not to the self righteous, they were deaf, but to the poor in spirit, to the polluted, the hardened reprobate, who wished by faith and repentance, though dyed in sin like scarlet, to be washed white as wool. To hear this teacher of the word, who set up his stool near a village on the Witney road, I repaired: I and many a moaning old woman beside; watchful, with our chorus of amen and our sobs and groans at every divine ejaculation, to aid the heaving motions of the spirit, and take heaven by storm.

The elect were assembled, and with them a greater number of the unconverted; heads were uncovered, a hymn was sung, and a long extempore string of intercessions, praying that the Lord would lay bare his arm and strike the guilty with terror; that Christ crucified would be among them; that they might be washed in the blood of the immaculate lamb; and that the holy spirit would breathe the God-man Jesus into all hearts, with many more absurdities, was uttered.

The preacher then took his text, and chose for his subject the casting the buyers and sellers out of the temple. This was an opportunity not to be lost by me. A gospel minister was indeed a rara avis, at Oxford. I therefore took out my utensils and very industriously wrote notes, that the divine breathings of the man of God might not be lost upon me.—'Buyers and sellers,' said he, 'you must be cast out! The tables of the money changers must be overthrown; you have defiled the temple of the Saviour! In what do you trade? In vanity. In gold, silver, iron, brass, houses, corn, cattle, goods, and chattels. But gold and silver may be stolen; iron will rust; brass will break; cattle will die; corn will mildew; houses will burn; they will tumble about your ears! Repent, or you will quickly bring an old house over your heads! Your goods and chattels will but kindle the fire in which you are to burn everlastingly! What are your occupations? Why, to hoard, and sell your souls for gain, that your heirs may squander and buy a hot place in hell! I am not one of your fashionable fine spoken mealy mouthed preachers: I tell you the plain truth. What are your pastimes? Cards and dice, fiddling and dancing, guzzling and guttling! Can you be saved by dice? No! Will the four knaves give you a passport to heaven? No! Can you fiddle yourself into a good birth among the sheep? No! You are goats, and goat like you may dance yourselves to damnation! You may guzzle wine here, but you shall want a drop of water to cool your tongue hereafter! You may guttle, while righteous Lazarus is lying at your gate. But wait a little! He shall soon lie in Abraham's bosom, while you shall roast on the devil's great gridiron, and be seasoned just to his tooth!—Will the prophets say, "Come here gamester, and teach us the long odds?"—'Tis odds if they do!—Will the martyrs rant, and swear, and shuffle, and cut with you? No! The martyrs are no shufflers! You will be cut so as you little expect: you are a field of tares, and Lucifer is your head farmer. He will come with his reapers and his sickles and his forks, and you will be cut down and bound and pitched and carted and housed in hell. I will not oil my lips with lies to please you: I tell you the plain truth: you will go to hell! Ammon and Mammon and Moloch are head stoakers; they are making Bethhoron hot for you! Prophane wretches, you daily wrangle and brawl and tell one another—"I will see you damned first! —But I tell you the day will come when you will pray to Beelzebub to let you escape his clutches! And what will be his answer?—"I will see you damned first!"

To this rhapsody of strange but impressive vulgar eloquence I listened, with rapture, for nearly an hour; selecting and noting down the passages that I thought most remarkable, many of which were too extravagant, if repeated, to be believed. In the height of these effusions, when the divine man was torturing his lungs to be heard by the increasing croud, he on his stool, I seated uncapped in a cart by his side, who should I see approach, in a phaeton and pair, but Hector Mowbray? And by his side—! Yes!—Olivia! The beauteous Olivia! no longer a child, but tall, straight, perfectly formed; every limb in the most captivating symmetry, every feature in the full bloom of youth; intelligence in every look, grace in every motion, sweetness in every smile! Attracted by curiosity, her brother arrested his course, drew up, and placed the celestial vision full in view!

Oh, frailty of the flesh! My new made garb of righteousness dropped from my shoulders! The old Adam, that had been dead in me, again revived; the workings of the spirit ceased; I gazed on an apparition which was indeed heavenly, and forgot the apostles the prophets and the martyrs! The preacher himself was heard no more; nor more would have been heard, had he not with all the effrontery of a fanatic interrupted his discourse, to address himself personally to Hector and Olivia, by which he excited sensations in me that were wholly unexpected — 'Jehu driveth furiously,' said he; 'but Jezebel was given to the dogs! [My choler instantly began to rise] Sinners! drive not so fast! The way is broad, and Tophet is gaping, where is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth! You will be there, poor lost souls, sooner than you expect! The way to heaven is narrow, much too narrow for your large consciences; and, though the court is spacious, the gate is too little for you to drive in with your coaches and six! No, not even your vis a vis, nor your phaetons neither, not so much as a tumbril or a buggie can get past! But perhaps you think to ride up to the gate, and there to cry, peccavi! and that then it will open, and you will be admitted? But, no! no! I tell you, no! You shall never be able to utter more than pec, pec, pec; and while with your mouths open you are stammering and stuttering to get out cavi, Satan and his blackguards shall come and peck you, even as crows peck carrion. Yes, Jehu and Jezebel! Remember! I give you warning!'

If I, one of the preacher's disciples, could scarcely refrain from falling upon him for his insolence, what must the choleric and brutal Hector feel, hearing himself repeatedly laughed at by the delighted unmannerly mob, during this impudent harangue? He dropped the reins, jumped from the phaeton, sprang through the croud, and began to horsewhip the inspired man in the most furious manner.

And now an accident happened, which of all others that I can remember gave me the most terror. Olivia sat alone in the phaeton; the reins were loose, and the fighting shouting and uproar of the divided mob occasioned the horses to take fright. They snorted, kicked, and set off full speed, with the helpless Olivia screaming for aid! The moment Hector left the carriage I saw what was likely to happen, leaped from the cart where I sat, and flew like lightening after the frantic animals. Few men were swifter of foot than I was, but they had the start and were on the full gallop. The danger was imminent. On one side of the road was a gravel pit, on the other the river, and before them was a bridge, the walls of which were not breast high. A cart was passing the bridge, and the mad horses, still on full speed, ran on the wrong side, dashed the phaeton against the cart, overturned it, and threw Olivia over the wall into the river!

The freshes had lately come down, and the stream was both deep and strong. I was at the foot of the bridge when she fell, and when I reached the place she was still above water, and had passed the arch on the other side. I instantly stripped off my coat cap and gown, sprang into the eddy, made a few strokes, and, as happy fortune would have it, just caught her as she was sinking!

Loaded with this precious burden, I had the strength of twenty men. I stemmed the current and presently brought her into shallow water, where I could find footing. I then bore her into the nearest house, and every possible aid was immediately administered.

While I was thus employed Hector arrived, his rage boiling over anew, at his lamed horses and broken phaeton; for his inquiries concerning his sister were short, as soon as he understood that she was not drowned. I paid as little attention to him as he did to her, and was disturbed only by my fears lest the ••ig•• should be productive of fever, or still worse consequences.

Olivia had too much sincerity of heart, and too great a desire to remove the anxiety of those around her, to be guilty of the least affectation. She had received no injury, for the danger being over her mind was too strong not to dispel her fears; and, after reposing an hour and finding herself perfectly well, she insisted on coming down and joining us at dinner. Her thanks to me in words were not profuse, but they were emphatical. 'She was alive, and should never forget that she owed that life to me.' This she three times repeated; once at table, again in the post chaise in which we returned to Oxford, and once more when we took leave of each other in the evening.

To me this day was indeed a day of tumult. Nothing perhaps more aptly prepares the mind for the passion of love than religious enthusiasm. The subject of my conversation with Olivia was chiefly a revival of former times, which seemed to be remembered by us mutually with glowing regret, as the happiest moments of our existence: times which I inwardly dreaded might never return.

Fanatical reveries excepted, this perhaps was the first desponding thought I had known; at least it was the first I can distinctly remember, and the pang that accompanied it was severe. Olivia was so lovely, her form so enchanting, her manners so captivating, that my eyes were riveted on her, my soul absorbed, and the faculty of thinking arrested. Every look of her beaming eyes penetrated to the heart, every motion of her moist coral lips gave exstacy, and every variation of her features discovered new ineffable and angelic beauties!

Why did the hours sly? Why was the day so short? She had only passed through Oxford in her way to London, and was to depart in the morning. I would gladly have persuaded her to regard her health, and not expose herself so soon after the fright; but in vain. She felt no malady, nor would acknowledge any; and the selfish Hector was rather inclined to hurry her off than invite her to stay. It was years since I had seen her, and to be torn thus suddenly from bliss unutterable? Never had I felt a pang like this before!

In the evening, returned to my chamber and left in solitude, I sat with my arms folded, disconsolate, motionless, and in a profound but yet a most active trance. I remained thus for hours, ardently thinking on Olivia, recollecting every incident of my past life in which she had had the least part, placing all her divine perfections full in view, and unable to detach my mind one moment from the beatific vision!

At length by accident, I cast my eye on two books, that lay on the mantle-piece before me: Baxter's Call to the Unconverted, and the History of Francis Spira: two of the most terrific productions, to such a mind at such a moment, that ever the ravings of fanaticism sent forth. The impulse was irresistible; I opened them, read, and all the horror: of hell came upon me. I was a backslider! Perdition was certain! All the torments that Baxter d•scribed were devouring me, and my soul was sinking, like the so•l of Francis Spira, into sulphu•eous flames, there to howl and be eternally tormented by the malignant mo•ks and mows of inexorable fiends! I have since suffered many evils, or what are called evils, and have known misfortunes such as are supposed to be of the severest kind; but, of all the nights of my life, not one can equal this. I fell on my knees, and attempted to pray, but imagined the ear of mercy shut, and that I beheld the wicked one stand ready to seize and fly away with me! My teeth began to gnash, as if by irresistible impulse; my hair stood an end, and large drops of sweat f•ll from my face! The eternal damnation, of which I had read and heard so much, seemed inevitable; till at last, in a torrent of phrenzy which I had not the power to controul, I began to blaspheme, believing myself to be already a fiend!

It is by such horrible imagery that so many of the disciples of methodism have become maniacs.

My dereliction of intellect fortunately was but of short duration: overpowered and exhausted, I at length sunk to sleep, my head leaning on the bed and I kneeling by its side. How long I remained thus I cannot tell, but I awoke in a shivering fit from a dream of terror, and found myself in the dark. I hastily undressed myself, got into bed, and shrunk beneath the bed clothes, as if escaping from Satan, whom imagination once more placed at my elbow, in forms inexpressibly horrid.

The visions of the night had left too deep an impression not to be in part revived in the morning. Tho•ghts however that had lately escaped me were now called to recollection. I remembered having once believed that God was the God of mercy; that for him to delight in the torture of lost souls was impossible; and that I had even doubted of the eternity of future torments. To this relief a more effectual one was added: Olivia could not be forgotten, and my thoughts, by being continually attracted and fixed on her, were relieved from despair, which might otherwise have been fatal

A week passed away in such kind of convulsive meditations, my attachment to methodism daily declining, and at last changing into something like aversion and horror. At the end of this period, I was sent for in the morning by the president. The incident was alarming! I had broken no college rules, neglected no prayers, nor been guilty of any indecorum. I foreboded that he had heard of my methodistical excursion. The conjecture was true: he told me it was too publicly known to be passed over in silence; that the character of the university had greatly suffered by this kind of heresy; that the vice chancellor, proctors, and heads of houses had been consulted, and that the gentlest punishment they could inflict was rustication for two terms. It would have been much more severe, he said, but for the respect he bore to the memory of my grandfather; who had been a doctor of the university, a worthy pillar of the church, and his good friend.

Though I suspected my opinions, I was not so entirely convinced as openly to renounce them, and I remained silent when he required me to recant. But I requested him to tell me how the event had become public? Not a gownsman was present, except Hector Mowbray; and surely he was above the character of an informer? Especially, thought I, in this instance! The president however was silent; I was suffered to suppose what I pleased, and I left him with the sentence of rustication confirmed, and my long expected academical honours deferred. The only favour granted me was that the punishment should not be made public.

CHAP. XVII.

DISAPPOINTMENT: MORE MARRIAGE ACCIDENTS: PREPARATIONS FOR A JOURNEY.

THE delay of two terms was by no means pleasing to me. I had nearly waited the stipulated time, had read wall lectures, and had done juraments, and generals. Aristotle had been laid upon my head, and I had been created a Soph. In fine, I had complied with all the forms of the university; forms which once perhaps might have had a meaning, but which are now offensively absurd. I expected the next term to have obtained the degree of bachelor of arts, after which it was my intention to have gone to London, there to have been ordained, and to have sought a flock wanting a pastor, on whom the stores of my theology and the powers of my elocution might have been well bestowed.

Traversed in this design, I determined to repair to the great city immediately, and return to keep my terms at Oxford when the period of rustication should have elapsed. But I had been obliged to furnish myself with books and music, and had found the hundred pounds a year allowed me scarcely sufficient; and, beside the charges of travelling and removal, I was informed that London was an expensive place. It was therefore necessary I should write to the country, for a supply. The correspondence with my mother, though not pursued with all the zeal in which it was begun, had been occasionally continued. At fir•t her letters abounded with eulogiums on her husband, but the subject afterward began to cool with her, and she had lately forborne even to mention his name. In answer to the letters which I wrote, to inform her and lawyer Thornby of my plan and to request a supply, a part of the truth appeared. Her husband was a young man, who, coming sooner into the possession of money than of good sense, had squandered as much of it as he could wrest from his uncle, the lawyer, who affirmed the whole or nearly the whole was wasted; and, when he could obtain no more, had left her to depend on Thornby's bounty and had gone to London.

These disagreeable circumstances were in part communicated by my mother and in part by Thornby, who had written to tell me that, if a small advance were made, it must be deducted from the thousand pounds, bequeathed as before mentioned. To this I willingly agreed, and, giving him all the legal security he required, I received fifty pounds; after which I made the necessary preparations for my intended journey, and obtained letters of recommendation to a clergyman in London, and to the Bishop of — to whom, when I should have taken my bachelor's degree, I meant to apply for deacon's orders.

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The adventures of Hugh Trevor: By Thomas Holcroft. ... [pt.1]

Holcroft, Thomas, 1745-1809.

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http://ota.ox.ac.uk/id/4449

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1106014480

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9781106014481

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K057530.001

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CW3311570144

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0020600401

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— The adventures of Hugh Trevor: By Thomas Holcroft. ..., Holcroft, Thomas, 1745-1809.. 6v. ; 12⁰. London :: printed for Shepperson and Reynolds,. 1794-97.. [Vols.4,5 & 6 bear the imprint: printed for G. G. and J. Robinson; and Shepperson and Reynolds, 1797.] [Reproduction of original from the British Library.] [English Short Title Catalog, ESTCT66947.] [Electronic data. Farmington Hills, Mich. : Thomson Gale, 2003. Page image (PNG). Digitized image of the microfilm version produced in Woodbridge, CT by Research Publications, 1982-2002 (later known as Primary Source Microfilm, an imprint of the Gale Group).]

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