comfort, none
of us could comprehend. 'He was the humble lover of my mother, Richie,' I
heard with some confusion, and that he adored her memory. The statement
was part of an entreaty to me to provide liberally for Bagenhope's
pension before we quitted England. 'I am not seriously anxious for much
else,' said my father. Yet was he fully conscious of the defeat he had
sustained and the catastrophe he had brought down upon me: his touch of
my hand told me that, and his desire for darkness and sleep. He had
nothing to look to, nothing to see twinkling its radiance for him in the
dim distance now; no propitiating Government, no special Providence. But
he never once put on a sorrowful air to press for pathos, and I thanked
him. He was a man endowed to excite it in the most effective manner, to a
degree fearful enough to win English sympathies despite his un-English
faults. He could have drawn tears in floods, infinite pathetic
commiseration, from our grangousier public, whose taste is to have it as
it may be had to the mixture of one-third of nature in two-thirds of
artifice. I believe he was expected to go about with this beggar's
petition for compassion, and it was a disappointment to the generous, for
which they punished him, that he should have abstained. And moreover his
simple quietude was really touching to true-hearted people. The elements
of pathos do not permit of their being dispensed from a stout smoking
bowl. I have to record no pathetic field-day. My father was never
insincere in emotion.

I spared his friends, chums, associates, excellent men of a kind, the
trial of their attachment by shunning them. His servants I dismissed
personally, from M. Alphonse down to the coachman Jeremy, whose speech to
me was, that he should be happy to serve my father again, or me, if he
should happen to be out of a situation when either of us wanted him,
which at least showed his preference for employment: on the other hand,
Alphonse, embracing the grand extremes of his stereotyped national
oratory, where 'SI JAMAIS,' like the herald Mercury new-mounting, takes
its august flight to set in the splendour of 'ausqu'n LA MORT,' declared
all other service than my father's repugnant, and vowed himself to a
hermitage, remote from condiments. They both meant well, and did but
speak the diverse language of their blood. Mrs. Waddy withdrew a respited
heart to Dipwell; it being, according to her experiences, the third time
that my father ha