s at Castlewood. 1759

We know, my dear children, from our favourite fairy story-books, how at
all christenings and marriages some one is invariably disappointed,
and vows vengeance; and so need not wonder that good cousin Will should
curse and rage energetically at the news of his brother's engagement
with the colonial heiress. At first, Will fled the house, in his wrath,
swearing he would never return. But nobody, including the swearer,
believed much in Master Will's oaths; and this unrepentant prodigal,
after a day or two, came back to the paternal house. The fumes of the
marriage-feast allured him: he could not afford to resign his knife and
fork at Castlewood table. He returned, and drank and ate there in token
of revenge. He pledged the young bride in a bumper, and drank perdition
to her under his breath. He made responses of smothered maledictions
as her father gave her away in the chapel, and my lord vowed to love,
honour and cherish her. He was not the only grumbler respecting that
marriage, as Mr. Warrington knew: he heard, then and afterwards, no
end of abuse of my lady and her grandfather. The old gentleman's City
friends, his legal adviser, the Dissenting clergyman at whose chapel
they attended on their first arrival in England, and poor Jack Lambert,
the orthodox young divine, whose eloquence he had fondly hoped had
been exerted over her in private, were bitter against the little lady's
treachery, and each had a story to tell of his having been enslaved,
encouraged, jilted, by the young American. The lawyer, who had had such
an accurate list of all her properties, estates, moneys, slaves, ships,
expectations, was ready to vow and swear that he believed the whole
account was false; that there was no such place as New York or Virginia;
or at any rate, that Mr. Van den Bosch had no land there; that there was
no such thing as a Guinea trade, and that the negroes were so many
black falsehoods invented by the wily old planter. The Dissenting pastor
moaned over his stray lambling--if such a little, wily, mischievous
monster could be called a lamb at all. Poor Jack Lambert ruefully
acknowledged to his mamma the possession of a lock of black hair, which
he bedewed with tears and apostrophised in quite unclerical language:
and, as for Mr. William Esmond, he, with the shrieks and curses in which
he always freely indulged, even at Castlewood, under his sister-in-law's
own pretty little nose, when under any strong emo