f the day. He could do so, for he was pure. Any
wildness in him that his father noted, any remoteness or richness of
fancy in his expressions, was set down as incidental to the Blossoming
Season. There is nothing like a theory for binding the wise. Sir Austin,
despite his rigid watch and ward, knew less of his son than the servant
of his household. And he was deaf, as well as blind. Adrian thought it
his duty to tell him that the youth was consuming paper. Lady Blandish
likewise hinted at his mooning propensities. Sir Austin from his lofty
watch-tower of the System had foreseen it, he said. But when he came to
hear that the youth was writing poetry, his wounded heart had its reasons
for being much disturbed.

"Surely," said Lady Blandish, "you knew he scribbled?"

"A very different thing from writing poetry," said the baronet. "No
Feverel has ever written poetry."

"I don't think it's a sign of degeneracy," the lady remarked. "He rhymes
very prettily to me."

A London phrenologist, and a friendly Oxford Professor of poetry, quieted
Sir Austin's fears.

The phrenologist said he was totally deficient in the imitative faculty;
and the Professor, that he was equally so in the rhythmic, and instanced
several consoling false quantities in the few effusions submitted to him.
Added to this, Sir Austin told Lady Blandish that Richard had, at his
best, done what no poet had ever been known to be capable of doing: he
had, with his own hands, and in cold blood, committed his virgin
manuscript to the flames: which made Lady Blandish sigh forth, "Poor
boy!"

Killing one's darling child is a painful imposition. For a youth in his
Blossoming Season, who fancies himself a poet, to be requested to destroy
his first-born, without a reason (though to pretend a reason cogent
enough to justify the request were a mockery), is a piece of abhorrent
despotism, and Richard's blossoms withered under it. A strange man had
been introduced to him, who traversed and bisected his skull with
sagacious stiff fingers, and crushed his soul while, in an infallible
voice, declaring him the animal he was making him feel such an animal!
Not only his blossoms withered, his being seemed to draw in its shoots
and twigs. And when, coupled thereunto (the strange man having departed,
his work done), his father, in his tenderest manner, stated that it would
give him pleasure to see those same precocious, utterly valueless,
scribblings among the cinders, the la