sense to pull down a side of the mansion for
every estate they parted with, it had at last grown an encumbrance.
There was a residence fit for a man of ten thousand a-year, and a rental
of about eight hundred--the helmet of Otranto on the head of Sir
Geoffrey Hudson.

If I could have been a bishop, or even a dean, and laid by four or five
thousand a-year--such were my father's views of me, and of
ecclesiastical preferment--I might buy back some of the ancient land and
repair the house, and that was the reason he determined I should go into
the church; for it is to be observed, that fathers have extraordinary
eyes when directed to the future fortunes of their sons. They seem to
have no power of seeing small curacy-houses filled with twelve children,
and butchers and bakers walking down the avenue in a melancholy and
despairing manner at Christmas time; but have pertinaciously before
their sight a superb mansion in James's Square, with a steady old coach
and two fat horses at the door; or a fine old turreted palace at
Lambeth, with five or six chaplains contesting the honour of the last
lick of the plate. Not a glimpse can they discover of the cold
rides--miserable scenes among the dying, the idle, the dissolute--hope
deferred--strength decaying--the proud man's contumely, the rich
vulgarian's scorn--struggle, struggle! toil and trouble! Blessings, say
I, on the outspoken head of St John's, and the impenetrability of
Euclid, that kept a blue coat on my back, and disappointed my father's
expectation of seeing me Lord Bishop of Durham. I should have been
chaplain to a poor-house to a certainty, and have envied my
parishioners; but I doubt very much, in the mean time, if the chaplain
of a poor-house would have envied me, imprisoned and pauperized in
Rayleigh Court.

Luckily there were books--whole shelves of them--loaded with rich
morocco bindings, and pecks enough of dust (if distributed through the
month of March) to have ransomed all the Pharaohs. I passed over the
Dugdales, and even the Gwyllins, in despair; and lay whole days on the
floor, surrounded by _Faery Queens_ and other anti-utilitarian
publications, sometimes fancying myself a Red-Cross knight--though
considerably at a loss to devise a substitute for the heavenly Una. But
by some strange caprice of fortune, a hoard was opened to me in one of
the lower shelves, beside the oriel window, which was more valuable than
Potosi and Golconda--a complete set of the Wav