other's old
friends, Lady Diana Tracy and Lord Erymanth, her brother, used to
bemoan with me the coming of this lad, born of a plebeian mother, bred
up in a penal colony, and, no doubt, uneducated except in its coarsest
vices. Lord Erymanth told at endless length all the advice he had
given my father in vain, and bewailed the sense of justice that had
bequeathed the property to such a male heir as could not fail to be a
scourge to the country. Everyone had some story to tell of Ambrose's
fiery speeches and insubordinate actions, viewing Eustace as not so bad
because his mere satellite--and what must not their sons be?

The only person who had any feeling of pity or affection for them was
old Miss Woolmer. She was the daughter of a former clergyman of
Mycening, the little town which is almost at our park-gates. She was
always confined to the house by rheumatic-gout. She had grown up with
my brothers. I sometimes wondered if she had not had a little
tenderness for one of them, but I believe it was almost elder-sisterly.
She told me much in their excuse. My father had never been the fond,
indulgent father to them that I remembered him, but a strict, stern
authority when he was at home, and when he was absent leaving them far
too much to their own devices; while Prometesky was a very attractive
person, brilliant, accomplished, full of fire and of faith in his
theories of universal benevolence and emancipation.

She thought, if the times had not been such as to bring them into
action, Ambrose would have outgrown and modified all that was dangerous
in his theories, and that they would have remained mere talk, the
ebullition of his form of knight-errantry; for it was generous
indignation and ardour that chiefly led him astray, and Eustace was
always his double: but there were some incidents at the time which
roused him to fury. Lewthwayte was a Cumberland man, who had inherited
the stock and the last years of a lease of a farm on Lord Erymanth's
property; he had done a good deal for it, and expended money on the
understanding that he should have the lease renewed, but he was a man
of bold, independent northern tongue, and gave great offence to his
lordship, who was used to be listened to with a sort of feudal
deference. He was of the fierce old Norse blood, and his daughters
were tall, fair, magnificent young women, not at all uneducated nor
vulgar, and it was the finding that my brothers were becoming intimate
at h