y at present
enjoys. She was a great friend of Sir Robert Walpole, and would not rest
until her husband slept at Lambeth, my papa used laughing to say. However,
the bishop died of apoplexy suddenly, and his wife erected a great
monument over him; and the pair sleep under that stone, with a canopy of
marble clouds and angels above them--the first Mrs. Tusher lying sixty
miles off at Castlewood.

But my papa's genius and education are both greater than any a woman can
be expected to have, and his adventures in Europe far more exciting than
his life in this country, which was past in the tranquil offices of love
and duty; and I shall say no more by way of introduction to his memoirs,
nor keep my children from the perusal of a story which is much more
interesting than that of their affectionate old mother,

Rachel Esmond Warrington.

CASTLEWOOD, VIRGINIA,
November 3, 1778.

Book I. The Early Youth Of Henry Esmond, Up To The Time Of His Leaving
Trinity College, In Cambridge

The actors in the old tragedies, as we read, piped their iambics to a
tune, speaking from under a mask, and wearing stilts and a great
head-dress. 'Twas thought the dignity of the Tragic Muse required these
appurtenances, and that she was not to move except to a measure and
cadence. So Queen Medea slew her children to a slow music: and King
Agamemnon perished in a dying fall (to use Mr. Dryden's words): the Chorus
standing by in a set attitude, and rhythmically and decorously bewailing
the fates of those great crowned persons. The Muse of History hath
encumbered herself with ceremony as well as her Sister of the Theatre. She
too wears the mask and the cothurnus, and speaks to measure. She too, in
our age, busies herself with the affairs only of kings; waiting on them
obsequiously and stately, as if she were but a mistress of Court
ceremonies, and had nothing to do with the registering of the affairs of
the common people. I have seen in his very old age and decrepitude the old
French King Lewis the Fourteenth, the type and model of kinghood--who never
moved but to measure, who lived and died according to the laws of his
Court-marshal, persisting in enacting through life the part of Hero; and,
divested of poetry, this was but a little wrinkled old man, pock-marked,
and with a great periwig and red heels to make him look tall--a hero for a
book if you like, or for a brass statue or a painted ceiling, a god in a
Roman shape, but what more than