said
of Newmarket, but what she had remarked, with great anxiety and
terror, that my lord, ever since his acquaintance with the Lord
Mohun especially, had recurred to his fondness for play, which he had
renounced since his marriage.

"But men promise more than they are able to perform in marriage," said
my lady, with a sigh. "I fear he has lost large sums; and our property,
always small, is dwindling away under this reckless dissipation. I heard
of him in London with very wild company. Since his return, letters
and lawyers are constantly coming and going: he seems to me to have a
constant anxiety, though he hides it under boisterousness and laughter.
I looked through--through the door last night, and--and before," said
my lady, "and saw them at cards after midnight; no estate will bear that
extravagance, much less ours, which will be so diminished that my son
will have nothing at all, and my poor Beatrix no portion!"

"I wish I could help you, madam," said Harry Esmond, sighing, and
wishing that unavailingly, and for the thousandth time in his life.

"Who can? Only God," said Lady Esmond--"only God, in whose hands we
are." And so it is, and for his rule over his family, and for
his conduct to wife and children--subjects over whom his power is
monarchical--any one who watches the world must think with trembling
sometimes of the account which many a man will have to render. For in
our society there's no law to control the King of the Fireside. He is
master of property, happiness--life almost. He is free to punish,
to make happy or unhappy--to ruin or to torture. He may kill a wife
gradually, and be no more questioned than the Grand seignior who drowns
a slave at midnight. He may make slaves and hypocrites of his children;
or friends and freemen; or drive them into revolt and enmity against the
natural law of love. I have heard politicians and coffee-house wiseacres
talking over the newspaper, and railing at the tyranny of the French
King, and the Emperor, and wondered how these (who are monarchs, too,
in their way) govern their own dominions at home, where each man rules
absolute. When the annals of each little reign are shown to the Supreme
Master, under whom we hold sovereignty, histories will be laid bare of
household tyrants as cruel as Amurath, and as savage as Nero, and as
reckless and dissolute as Charles.

If Harry Esmond's patron erred, 'twas in the latter way, from a
disposition rather self-indulgent than c