perplexing changes which had lately happened
might confuse a clearer head than Jobson's, and promised to retain him
in the family, offering him the choice of being his personal attendant,
or porter at Castle-Bellingham. Jobson's joy and gratitude were
unbounded. He preferred the former office. "Because," said he, "such a
blundering fellow as I, who cannot tell rebels from honest men, may let
pickpockets and gamblers into a true Lord's house, if they happen to
have smooth tongues, and shut plain honesty out of it, which I hope will
never be the case in Old England. But if I live always under Your
Honour's eye, you will keep me from doing wrong; and a simple man, like
me, is always best off when directed by those who know better than
himself."

Lord Bellingham is reported to have commended this opinion so warmly as
to say, he hoped the race of the Jobsons would never be extinct among
the British peasantry. But as this wish implies his persuasion, that
principle rather than information is the great desideratum in the lower
classes, I dare not affirm that my hero was so very illiberal, though,
as a Loyalist and a Churchman, I admit that he must have been adverse to
the generalizing philanthropy of that admired sentiment, "Education
untainted by the bigotry of proselytism," which, if it be any thing more
than a brilliant scintillation of wit, intended, by its happy
antithesis, to revive the dying embers of festive hilarity, must mean
that the ends of education are destroyed if they produce any effect; or,
in other words, that though the lower classes are to be taught every
thing, great care should be taken that they do not improve by any thing
they learn--a discovery equally profound with that of Dogberry, who
thought "writing and reading came by nature, but that to be
well-favoured was the gift of fortune."

I have only to add, that Lady Isabel Evellin long continued "to rock the
cradle of reposing age;" and, to the last hour of her life, enjoyed the
serene satisfaction which is the portion of those who, with true and
disinterested magnanimity, devote their abilities to the calls of duty
instead of wasting their lives in self-indulgence.

THE END.

Strahan and Preston,
Printers-Street, London.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3, by Jane West

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