man never known before
to transgress the very slowest of all possible walks, to have had two
events of the most rapid nature happen to him in the same week. Scarcely
had he recovered the shock of being ran away with by my aunt, before,
terminating for ever his vagrancies, he was ran through by my uncle.
The wits made an epigram upon the event; and my uncle, who was as bold
as a lion at the point of a sword, was, to speak frankly, terribly
disconcerted by the point of a jest. He retired to the country in a
fit of disgust and gout. Here his own _bon naturel_ rose from the
layers of art which had long oppressed it, and he solaced himself by
righteously governing domains worthy of a prince, for the mortifications
he had experienced in the dishonourable career of a courtier. Hitherto I
have spoken somewhat slightingly of my uncle; and in his dissipation he
deserved it, for he was both too honest and too simple to shine in that
galaxy of prostitute genius of which Charles II. was the centre. But in
retirement he was no longer the same person, and I do not think that
the elements of human nature could have furnished forth a more amiable
character than Sir William Devereux, presiding at Christmas over the
merriment of his great hall. Good old man! his very defects were what we
loved best in him; vanity was so mingled with good nature that it became
graceful, and we reverenced one the most, while we most smiled at the
other. One peculiarity had he, which the age he had lived in, and his
domestic history, rendered natural enough, viz. an exceeding distaste
to the matrimonial state: early marriages were misery; imprudent
marriages idiotism; and marriage at the best he was wont to say, with
a kindling eye and a heightened colour, marriage at the best--was the
devil. Yet it must not be supposed that Sir William Devereux was an
ungallant man. On the contrary, never did the _beau sexe_ have a
humbler or more devoted servant. As nothing in his estimation was less
becoming to a wise man than matrimony, so nothing was more ornamental
than flirtation. He had the old man's weakness, garrulity, and he told
the wittiest stories in the world, without omitting any thing in them
but the point. This omission did not arise from the want either of
memory or of humour, but solely from a deficiency in the malice natural
to all jesters. He could not persuade his lips to repeat a sarcasm
hurting even the dead or the ungrateful; and when he came to the