her all
upon her children, indulging them beyond all measure, as was inevitable
with one of her kindness of disposition; giving all her thoughts to their
welfare--learning, that she might teach them, and improving her own many
natural gifts and feminine accomplishments, that she might impart them to
her young ones. To be doing good for some one else, is the life of most
good women. They are exuberant of kindness, as it were, and must impart it
to some one. She made herself a good scholar of French, Italian, and
Latin, having been grounded in these by her father in her youth: hiding
these gifts from her husband out of fear, perhaps, that they should offend
him, for my lord was no bookman--pish'd and psha'd at the notion of learned
ladies, and would have been angry that his wife could construe out of a
Latin book of which he could scarce understand two words. Young Esmond was
usher, or house tutor, under her or over her, as it might happen. During
my lord's many absences, these schooldays would go on uninterruptedly: the
mother and daughter learning with surprising quickness: the latter by fits
and starts only, and as suited her wayward humour. As for the little lord,
it must be owned that he took after his father in the matter of
learning--liked marbles and play, and the great horse, and the little one
which his father brought him, and on which he took him out a-hunting--a
great deal better than Corderius and Lily; marshalled the village boys,
and had a little court of them, already flogging them, and domineering
over them with a fine imperious spirit, that made his father laugh when he
beheld it, and his mother fondly warn him. The cook had a son, the woodman
had two, the big lad at the porter's lodge took his cuffs and his orders.
Doctor Tusher said he was a young nobleman of gallant spirit; and Harry
Esmond, who was his tutor, and eight years his little lordship's senior,
had hard work sometimes to keep his own temper, and hold his authority
over his rebellious little chief and kinsman.

In a couple of years after that calamity had befallen which had robbed
Lady Castlewood of a little--a very little--of her beauty, and her careless
husband's heart (if the truth must be told, my lady had found not only
that her reign was over, but that her successor was appointed, a princess
of a noble house in Drury Lane somewhere, who was installed and visited by
my lord at the town eight miles off--_pudet haec opprobria dicere nobis_