n that event. My father introduced Conway
to Brookes's, and invited him to dinner twice a week for a whole
twelvemonth.

Not long after this occurrence, by the death of my grandfather, my uncle
succeeded to the title and estates of the family. He was, as people
justly observed, rather an odd man: built schools for peasants, forgave
poachers, and diminished his farmers' rents; indeed, on account of these
and similar eccentricities, he was thought a fool by some, and a madman
by others. However, he was not quite destitute of natural feeling; for
he paid my father's debts, and established us in the secure enjoyment of
our former splendour. But this piece of generosity, or justice, was done
in the most unhandsome manner; he obtained a promise from my father to
retire from Brookes's, and relinquish the turf; and he prevailed upon
my mother to take an aversion to diamonds, and an indifference to china
monsters.

CHAPTER II.

Tell arts they have no soundness, But vary by esteeming; Tell schools
they want profoundness, And stand too much on seeming. If arts and
schools reply, Give arts and schools the lie.--The Soul's Errand.

At ten years old I went to Eton. I had been educated till that period by
my mother, who, being distantly related to Lord ------, (who had published
"Hints upon the Culinary Art"), imagined she possessed an hereditary
claim to literary distinction. History was her great forte; for she had
read all the historical romances of the day, and history accordingly I
had been carefully taught.

I think at this moment I see my mother before me, reclining on her sofa,
and repeating to me some story about Queen Elizabeth and Lord Essex;
then telling me, in a languid voice, as she sank back with the exertion,
of the blessings of a literary taste, and admonishing me never to read
above half an hour at a time for fear of losing my health.

Well, to Eton I went; and the second day I had been there, I was half
killed for refusing, with all the pride of a Pelham, to wash tea-cups. I
was rescued from the clutches of my tyrant by a boy not much bigger
than myself, but reckoned the best fighter, for his size, in the whole
school. His name was Reginald Glanville: from that period, we became
inseparable, and our friendship lasted all the time he stayed at Eton,
which was within a year of my own departure for Cambridge.

His father was a baronet, of a very ancient and wealthy family; and his
mother was a woman of so