ch she
joined; and when I saw her last, talked to me of possessing a peculiar
spiritual illumination, which I strongly suspected at the time to be
occasioned by the too free use of liquor: but I remember when she and
her husband were good to me and mine, at a period when sympathy was
needful, and many a Pharisee turned away.

I have told how easy it was to rise and fall in my fickle aunt's favour,
and how each of us brothers, by turns, was embraced and neglected. My
turn of glory had been after the success of my play. I was introduced
to the town-wits; held my place in their company tolerably well;
was pronounced to be pretty well bred by the macaronis and people of
fashion, and might have run a career amongst them had my purse been long
enough; had I chose to follow that life; had I not loved at that time
a pair of kind eyes better than the brightest orbs of the Gunnings or
Chudleighs, or all the painted beauties of the Ranelagh ring. Because I
was fond of your mother, will it be believed, children, that my tastes
were said to be low, and deplored by my genteel family? So it was, and I
know that my godly Lady Warrington and my worldly Madame Bernstein both
laid their elderly heads together and lamented my way of life. "Why,
with his name, he might marry anybody," says meek Religion, who had ever
one eye on Heaven and one on the main chance. "I meddle with no man's
affairs, and admire genius," says uncle, "but it is a pity you consort
with those poets and authors, and that sort of people, and that, when
you might have had a lovely creature, with a hundred thousand pounds,
you let her slip and make up to a country girl without a penny-piece."

"But if I had promised her, uncle?" says I.

"Promise, promise! these things are matters of arrangement and prudence,
and demand a careful look-out. When you first committed yourself with
little Miss Lambert, you had not seen the lovely American lady whom your
mother wished you to marry, as a good mother naturally would. And your
duty to your mother, nephew,--your duty to the Fifth Commandment, would
have warranted your breaking with Miss L., and fulfilling your excellent
mother's intentions regarding Miss--What was the Countess's Dutch name?
Never mind. A name is nothing; but a plumb, Master George, is something
to look at! Why, I have my dear little Miley at a dancing-school with
Miss Barwell, Nabob Barwell's daughter, and I don't disguise my wish
that the children may contract