e in a great bustling metropolis.

And yet that little apothecary who sold a stray customer a pennyworth of
salts, or a more fragrant cake of Windsor soap, was a gentleman of
good education, and of as old a family as any in the whole county of
Somerset. He had a Cornish pedigree which carried the Pendennises up to
the time of the Druids, and who knows how much farther back? They had
intermarried with the Normans at a very late period of their family
existence, and they were related to all the great families of Wales and
Brittany. Pendennis had had a piece of University education too, and
might have pursued that career with great honour, but that in his second
year at Cambridge his father died insolvent, and poor Pen was obliged
to betake himself to the pestle and apron. He always detested the trade,
and it was only necessity, and the offer of his mother's brother, a
London apothecary of low family, into which Pendennis's father had
demeaned himself by marrying, that forced John Pendennis into so odious
a calling.

He quickly after his apprenticeship parted from the coarse-minded
practitioner his relative, and set up for himself at Bath with his
modest medical ensign. He had for some time a hard struggle with
poverty; and it was all he could do to keep the shop and its gilt
ornaments in decent repair, and his bed-ridden mother in comfort: but
Lady Ribstone happening to be passing to the Rooms with an intoxicated
Irish chairman who bumped her ladyship up against Pen's very door-post,
and drove his chair-pole through the handsomest pink bottle in
the surgeon's window, alighted screaming from her vehicle, and was
accommodated with a chair in Mr. Pendennis's shop, where she was brought
round with cinnamon and sal-volatile.

Mr. Pendennis's manners were so uncommonly gentlemanlike and soothing,
that her ladyship, the wife of Sir Pepin Ribstone, of Codlingbury, in
the county of Somerset, Bart., appointed her preserver, as she called
him, apothecary to her person and family, which was very large. Master
Ribstone coming home for the Christmas holidays from Eton, over-ate
himself and had a fever, in which Mr. Pendennis treated him with the
greatest skill and tenderness. In a word, he got the good graces of the
Codlingbury family, and from that day began to prosper. The good company
of Bath patronised him, and amongst the ladies especially he was beloved
and admired. First his humble little shop became a smart one: then he
disc