Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. Why should my son be a scholar, when it is not intended he should live by his learning ? By this rule, why should your son be honest, temperate, just, or charitable; since he depends not upon any of these qualities for a maintenance ? Swift. John Hartwell's pupil, Sir Henry Wood- bridge, was the only son of a vain, doting, silly mother, whose chief object was to see him enjoying to the utmost the youth, health, and fortune of twenty thousand per annum. Providence is said to mark its contempt of riches, in the persons of the mortals to whom opulence is assigned. Sir Gideon, the father of the young Baronet, was a man who, after displaying considerable tact in the amassment ofmoney as a city banker, had hastened to display his weakness at the West-end, by purchasing to be the partner of his old age a woman devoid of every qualification but high birth; while his only sister, a rich heiress, evinced her share in the family predilections by throwing herself and her large fortune away on the libertine younger brother of an earl. Sir Gideon, indeed, did not live to reap the fruits of his folly. Within two years of his marriage he was carried off by a pleurisy, caught, one bitter day in March, while bowing away from the portico of Hursley Park the coach and six of one of the lordly relatives of his lady. To his infant son, therefore, descended his immense fortune, and the baronetcy which a portion of it had purchased; and, from that moment, Lady Mary took double care that the winds of heaven, which had blown Sir Gideon into his grave, should not visit too roughly the cheek of little Sir Henry. Having become a mother at the age whenmany women become grandmothers, there was some excuse for the exuberant expansion of her ladyship's maternal sensibilities. Night...