crying with hunger in the streets, without
sharing his own crust with him. Indeed, his practice on this head was
said to be steady and uniform, whenever the rencontre took place after
my worthy father had had his own sympathies quickened by a good dinner;
a fact that maybe imputed to a keener sense of the pleasure he was about
to confer.

After sixteen, he was known to converse occasionally on the subject of
politics, a topic on which he came to be both expert and eloquent
before twenty. His usual theme was justice and the sacred rights of man,
concerning which he sometimes uttered very pretty sentiments, and such
as were altogether becoming in one who was at the bottom of the great
social pot that was then, as now, actively boiling, and where he was
made to feel most, the heat that kept it in ebullition. I am assured
that on the subject of taxation, and on that of the wrongs of America
and Ireland, there were few youths in the parish who could discourse
with more zeal and unction. About this time, too, he was heard shouting
"Wilkes and liberty!" in the public streets.

But, as is the case with all men of rare capacities, there was a
concentration of powers in the mind of my ancestor, which soon brought
all his errant sympathies, the mere exuberance of acute and overflowing
feelings, into a proper and useful subjection, centring all in the one
absorbing and capacious receptacle of self. I do not claim for my father
any peculiar quality in this respect, for I have often observed that
many of those who (like giddy-headed horsemen that raise a great dust,
and scamper as if the highway were too narrow for their eccentric
courses, before they are fairly seated in the saddle, but who afterward
drive as directly at their goals as the arrow parting from the bow),
most indulge their sympathies at the commencement of their careers, are
the most apt toward the close to get a proper command of their feelings,
and to reduce them within the bounds of common sense and prudence.
Before five-and-twenty, my father was as exemplary and as constant a
devotee of Plutus as was then to be found between Ratcliffe Highway and
Bridge Street:--I name these places in particular, as all the rest of
the great capital in which he was born is known to be more indifferent
to the subject of money.

My ancestor was just thirty, when his master, who like himself was
a bachelor, very unexpectedly, and a good deal to the scandal of the
neighborhood, int