red this youth, a youth of great
promise, to run up to the age of manhood, or near it at least, in next
to idleness; and had, besides, taken no sort of pains to give him even
the common premonitions against the vices of the town, and the dangers
of all sorts which wait the unexperienced and unwary in it. He lived at
home, and at discretion with his father, who himself kept a mistress;
and for the rest, provided Charles did not ask him for money, he was
indolently kind to him: he might lie out when he pleased, any excuse
would serve, and even his reprimands were so slight, that they carried
with them rather an air of connivance at the fault, than any serious
control or constraint. But, to supply his calls for money, Charles,
whose mother was dead, had, by her side, a grandmother, who doated
upon him. She had a considerable annuity to live on, and very regularly
parted with every shilling she could spare, to this darling of her's, to
the no little heart-burn of his father; who was vexed, not that she, by
this means, fed his son's extravagance, but that she preferred Charles
to himself; and we shall too soon see what a fatal turn such a mercenary
jealousy could operate on the breast of a father.

Charles was, however, by the means of his grandmother's lavish fondness,
very sufficiently enabled to keep a mistress, so easily contented as my
love made me; and my good fortune, for such I must ever call it, threw
me in his way, in the manner above related, just as he was on the
look-out for one.

As to temper, the even sweetness of it made him seem born for domestic
happiness: tender, naturally polite, and gentle-manner'd; it could never
be his fault, if ever jars, or animosities ruffled a calm he was so
qualified every way to maintain or restore. Without those great or
shining qualities that constitute a genius, or are fit to make a noise
in the world, he had all those humble ones that compose the softer
social merit: plain common sense, set off with every grace of modesty
and good nature, made him, if not admired, what is much happier:
universally beloved and esteemed. But, as nothing but the beauties
of his person had at first attracted my regard and fixed my passion,
neither was I then a judge of the internal merit, which I had afterwards
full occasion to discover, and which, perhaps, in that season of
giddiness and levity, would have touched my heart very little, had it
been lodged in a person less the delight of my eyes,