is in
a more deplorable Condition than that of being extinct.

When I visit the agreeable Seat of my honoured Friend Ruricola, and walk
from Room to Room revolving many pleasing Occurrences, and the
Expressions of many just Sentiments I have heard him utter, and see the
Booby his Heir in Pain while he is doing the Honours of his House to the
Friend of his Father, the Heaviness it gives one is not to be expressed.
Want of Genius is not to be imputed to any Man, but Want of Humanity is
a Man's own Fault. The Son of Ruricola, (whose Life was one continued
Series of worthy Actions and Gentleman-like Inclinations) is the
Companion of drunken Clowns, and knows no Sense of Praise but in the
Flattery he receives from his own Servants; his Pleasures are mean and
inordinate, his Language base and filthy, [his [2]] Behaviour rough and
absurd. Is this Creature to be accounted the Successor of a Man of
Virtue, Wit and Breeding? At the same time that I have this melancholy
Prospect at the House where I miss my old Friend, I can go to a
Gentleman's not far off it, where he has a Daughter who is the Picture
both of his Body and Mind, but both improved with the Beauty and Modesty
peculiar to her Sex. It is she who supplies the Loss of her Father to
the World; she, without his Name or Fortune, is a truer Memorial of him,
than her Brother who succeeds him in both. Such an Offspring as the
eldest Son of my Friend, perpetuates his Father in the same manner as
the Appearance of his Ghost would: It is indeed Ruricola, but it is
Ruricola grown frightful.

I know not to what to attribute the brutal Turn which this young Man has
taken, except it may be to a certain Severity and Distance which his
Father used towards him, and might, perhaps, have occasioned a Dislike
to those Modes of Life which were not made amiable to him by Freedom and
Affability.

We may promise our selves that no such Excrescence will appear in the
Family of the Cornelii, where the Father lives with his Sons like their
eldest Brother, and the Sons converse with him as if they did it for no
other Reason but that he is the wisest Man of their Acquaintance. As the
Cornelii are eminent Traders, their good Correspondence with each other
is useful to all that know them, as well as to themselves: And their
Friendship, Good-will and kind Offices, are disposed of jointly as well
as their Fortune, so that no one ever obliged one of them, who had not
the Obligation multiplied in Re