river, together with the large hills (to which we know, from simple
though metaphysical causes, how entire an idea of quiet and immovability
peculiarly attaches itself), and the white flocks,--those most peaceful
of God's creatures,--that in fleecy clusters stud the ascent.

In Warlock House, at the time we refer to, lived a gentleman of the name
of Brandon. He was a widower, and had attained his fiftieth year without
casting much regret on the past or feeling much anxiety for the
future. In a word, Joseph Brandon was one of those careless, quiescent,
indifferent men, by whom a thought upon any subject is never recurred to
without a very urgent necessity. He was good-natured, inoffensive, and
weak; and if he was not an incomparable citizen, he was at least an
excellent vegetable. He was of a family of high antiquity, and formerly
of considerable note. For the last four or five generations, however,
the proprietors of Warlock House, gradually losing something alike from
their acres and their consequence, had left to their descendants
no higher rank than that of a small country squire. One had been a
Jacobite, and had drunk out half-a-dozen farms in honour of Charley
over the water; Charley over the water was no very dangerous person, but
Charley over the wine was rather more ruinous. The next Brandon had been
a fox-hunter, and fox-hunters live as largely as patriotic politicians.
Pausanias tells us that the same people; who were the most notorious for
their love of wine were also the most notorious for their negligence
of affairs. Times are not much altered since Pausanias wrote, and the
remark holds as good with the English as it did with the Phigalei. After
this Brandon came one who, though he did not scorn the sportsman,
rather assumed the fine gentleman. He married an heiress, who of
course assisted to ruin him; wishing no assistance in so pleasing an
occupation, he overturned her (perhaps not on purpose), in a new sort of
carriage which he was learning to drive, and the good lady was killed
on the spot. She left the fine gentleman two sons,--Joseph Brandon, the
present thane,--and a brother some years younger. The elder, being of a
fitting age, was sent to school, and somewhat escaped the contagion of
the paternal mansion. But the younger Brandon, having only reached his
fifth year at the time of his mother's decease, was retained at home.
Whether he was handsome or clever or impertinent, or like his father
about t