ally supposed to impart. His father looked upon all
book knowledge as superfluous, except in a parson or schoolmaster; his
lady mother would have been shocked to find him, whether at Oxford or
elsewhere, any thing but the gay and fashionable nonentity which her
taste and experience had taught her to regard as the perfection of God's
fair creation. Lord Railton was a courtier, and affected to be a
politician; her ladyship was a woman of fashion. It is surprising to me
that, with their views of a nobleman's duties at Oxford, they should
have thought it necessary to procure for their son the services of one
who had nothing better to offer for his amusement, than the poor
learning he had picked up at Eton and elsewhere, to dole out again to
the best advantage, for the support of himself and widowed mother. I
ought rather to say it was surprising to me _then_. I have grown wiser
since. A tutor was necessary to the position of Lord Railton's son, and
it was my happiness to be chosen the instructor of Rupert Sinclair.
Every possible pains had been taken to ruin the intellect and impair the
moral faculties of the youth. His earliest teachers had been strictly
enjoined to give him no tasks which should subject him to the slightest
inconvenience, and were forbidden, under pain of dismissal, to ruffle
the serenity of his temper, or intercept the slightest movement of his
mind, however cross or wayward. Rupert in his very cradle had been
taught, both by precept and example, that his equals in rank were his
fellow creatures, and that all below him were--creatures, it is true,
but the fellows of one another, and not of him and such as he; that the
men to whose virtue, discretion, and conduct he was confided--his
TEACHERS--were--oh, mockery of mockeries!--his dependents and inferiors,
and necessary to him as his nurse or footman, but not a whit more so!
Lord Railton was a tyrant, self-willed and imperious by nature, and as
cold-blooded and selfish as a superadded artistocratic education could
render him. He saw little of his children, whom he terrified when he did
see them, and busied himself in this world with little more than the
intrigues and plots of the political junto to whom he was bound by a
community of interests, rather than affectionately attached. It is my
firm belief that miracles have not ceased upon the earth. Invisible
angels interpose now, as did the living saints of old, to repair the
faults and infirmities of nature,