f this early experience, I could
hardly prevent the reader from receiving an impression as of some higher
rank than did really belong to my family. My father was a merchant; not in
the sense of Scotland, where it means a man who sells groceries in a
cellar, but in the English sense, a sense severely exclusive--viz. he was
a man engaged in _foreign_ commerce, and no other; therefore, in
_wholesale_ commerce, and no other--which last circumstance it is
important to mention, because it brings him within the benefit of Cicero's
condescending distinction[3]--as one to be despised, certainly, but not
too intensely to be despised even by a Roman senator. He, this imperfectly
despicable man, died at an early age, and very soon after the incidents
here recorded, leaving to his family, then consisting of a wife and six
children, an unburthened estate producing exactly L1600 a-year. Naturally,
therefore, at the date of my narrative, if narrative it can be called, he
had an income still larger, from the addition of current commercial
profits. Now, to any man who is acquainted with commercial life, but above
all with such life in England, it will readily occur that in an opulent
English family of that class--opulent, though not rich in a mercantile
estimate--the domestic economy is likely to be upon a scale of liberality
altogether unknown amongst the corresponding orders in foreign nations.
Whether as to the establishment of servants, or as to the provision made
for the comfort of all its members, such a household not uncommonly
eclipses the scale of living even amongst the poorer classes of our
nobility, though the most splendid in Europe--a fact which, since the
period of my infancy, I have had many personal opportunities for verifying
both in England and in Ireland. From this peculiar anomaly affecting the
domestic economy of merchants, there arises a disturbance upon the general
scale of outward signs by which we measure the relations of rank. The
equation, so to speak, between one order of society and another, which
usually travels in the natural line of their comparative expenditure, is
here interrupted and defeated, so that one rank would be collected from
the name of the occupation, and another rank, much higher, from the
splendour of the domestic _menage_. I warn the reader, therefore, (or
rather, my explanation has already warned him,) that he is not to infer
from any casual gleam of luxury or elegance a corresponding elevat