ults and
underminings of the common enemy and the particular; these, with the
humorous indifference of familiarity and constitutional annoyances,
excepting when they grew acute and called for drugs, and with
friendliness to the race of man of both colours, in the belief that our
Creator originally composed in black and white, together with a liking
for matters on their present footing in slow motion, partly under his
conductorship, were the prominent characteristics of the grandson of the
founder of the house, who had built it from a spade.

The story of the building was notorious; popular books for the inciting
of young Englishmen to dig to fortune had a place for it among the
chapters, where we read of the kind of man, and the means by which the
country has executed its later giant strides of advancement. The first
John Mattock was a representative of his time; he moved when the country
was moving, and in the right direction, finding himself at the auspicious
moment upon a line of rail. Elsewhere he would have moved, we may
suppose, for the spade-like virtues bear their fruits; persistent and
thrifty, solid and square, will fetch some sort of yield out of any soil;
but he would not have gone far. The Lord, to whom an old man of a mind
totally Hebrew ascribed the plenitude of material success, the Lord and
he would have reared a garden in the desert; in proximity to an oasis,
still on the sands, against obstacles. An accumulation of upwards of four
hundred thousand pounds required, as the moral of the popular books does
not sufficiently indicate, a moving country, an ardent sphere, to produce
the sum: and since, where so much was done, we are bound to conceive
others at work as well as he, it seems to follow that the exemplar
outstripping them vastly must have profited by situation at the start,
which is a lucky accident; and an accident is an indigestible lump in a
moral tale, real though the story be. It was not mentioned in the popular
books; nor did those worthy guides to the pursuit of wealth contain any
reminder of old John Mattock's dependence upon the conjoint labour of his
fellows to push him to his elevation. As little did they think of
foretelling a day, generations hence, when the empty heirs of his fellows
might prefer a modest claim (confused in statement) to compensation
against the estate he bequeathed: for such prophecy as that would have
hinted at a tenderness for the mass to the detriment of the indiv