tenderness and care. If these be
the terms on which alone I can obtain your favour, I pray God
you may never cease to hate,--Madam, your much-injured son,
"Peregrine Pickle."

This letter, which nothing, but his passion and inexperience could
excuse, had such an effect upon his mother as may be easily conceived.
She was enraged to a degree of frenzy against the writer; though, at the
same time, she considered the whole as the production of Mrs. Trunnion's
particular pique, and represented it to her husband as an insult that he
was bound in honour to resent, by breaking off all correspondence with
the commodore and his family. This was a bitter pill to Gamaliel, who,
through a long course of years, was so habituated to Trunnion's company,
that he could as easily have parted with a limb as have relinquished the
club all at once. He therefore ventured to represent his own incapacity
to follow her advice, and begged that he might, at least, be allowed to
drop the connection gradually, protesting that he would do his endeavour
to give her all manner of satisfaction.

Meanwhile preparations were made for Peregrine's departure to the
university, and in a few weeks he set out, in the seventeenth year
of his age, accompanied by the same attendants who lived with him at
Winchester. His uncle laid strong injunctions upon him to avoid the
company of immodest women, to mind his learning, to let him hear of
his welfare as often as he could find time to write, and settled
his appointments at the rate of five hundred a year, including his
governor's salary, which was one-fifth part of the sum. The heart of
our young gentleman dilated at the prospect of the figure he should make
with such a handsome annuity the management of which was left to his
own discretion; and he amused his imagination with the most agreeable
reveries during his journey to Oxford, which he performed in two days.
Here, being introduced to the head of the college, to whom he had been
recommended, accommodated with genteel apartments, entered as gentleman
commoner in the books, and provided with a judicious tutor, instead of
returning to the study of Greek and Latin, in which he thought himself
already sufficiently instructed, he renewed his acquaintance with some
of his old school-fellows, whom he found in the same situation, and was
by them initiated in all the fashionable diversions of the place.

It was not long before he ma