recording,--his first campaign and his
last. My uncle did as his ancestors had done before him, and, cheap as
the dignity had grown, went up to court to be knighted by Charles II. He
was so delighted with what he saw of the metropolis that he forswore all
intention of leaving it, took to Sedley and champagne, flirted with Nell
Gwynne, lost double the value of his brother's portion at one sitting to
the chivalrous Grammont, wrote a comedy corrected by Etherege, and took
a wife recommended by Rochester. The wife brought him a child six months
after marriage, and the infant was born on the same day the comedy was
acted. Luckily for the honour of the house, my uncle shared the fate of
Plemneus, king of Sicyon, and all the offspring he ever had (that is to
say, the child and the play) "died as soon as they were born." My
uncle was now only at a loss what to do with his wife,--that remaining
treasure, whose readiness to oblige him had been so miraculously
evinced. She saved him the trouble of long cogitation, an exercise
of intellect to which he was never too ardently inclined. There was a
gentleman of the court, celebrated for his sedateness and solemnity;
my aunt was piqued into emulating Orpheus, and, six weeks after
her confinement, she put this rock into motion,--they eloped. Poor
gentleman! it must have been a severe trial of patience to a man never
known before to transgress the very slowest of all possible walks, to
have had two events of the most rapid nature happen to him in the same
week: scarcely had he recovered the shock of being run away with by my
aunt, before, terminating forever his vagrancies, he was run through by
my uncle. The wits made an epigram upon the event, and my uncle, who
was as bold as a lion at the point of a sword, was, to speak frankly,
terribly disconcerted by the point of a jest. He retired to the country
in a fit of disgust and gout. Here his natural goodness soon recovered
the effects of the artificial atmosphere to which it had been exposed,
and he solaced himself by righteously governing domains worthy of a
prince, for the mortifications he had experienced in the dishonourable
career of a courtier.

Hitherto I have spoken somewhat slightingly of my uncle, and in his
dissipation he deserved it, for he was both too honest and too simple to
shine in that galaxy of prostituted genius of which Charles II. was the
centre. But in retirement he was no longer the same person; and I do
not think