dez da Costas, who, I believe, still exist.

Whether it were that my grandfather, on his arrival, was not encouraged
by those to whom he had a right to look up,--which is often our hard
case in the outset of life,--or whether he was alarmed at the unexpected
consequences of Mr. Pelham's favourable disposition to his countrymen
in the disgraceful repeal of the Jew Bill, which occurred a very few
years after his arrival in this country, I know not; but certainly he
appears never to have cordially or intimately mixed with his community.
This tendency to alienation was, no doubt, subsequently encouraged by
his marriage, which took place in 1765. My grandmother, the beautiful
daughter of a family who had suffered much from persecution, had imbibed
that dislike for her race which the vain are too apt to adopt when they
find that they are born to public contempt. The indignant feeling that
should be reserved for the persecutor, in the mortification of their
disturbed sensibility, is too often visited on the victim; and the cause
of annoyance is recognised not in the ignorant malevolence of the
powerful, but in the conscientious conviction of the innocent sufferer.
Seventeen years, however, elapsed before my grandfather entered into
this union, and during that interval he had not been idle. He was only
eighteen when he commenced his career, and when a great responsibility
devolved upon him. He was not unequal to it. He was a man of ardent
character; sanguine, courageous, speculative, and fortunate; with a
temper which no disappointment could disturb, and a brain, amid
reverses, full of resource. He made his fortune in the midway of life,
and settled near Enfield, where he formed an Italian garden, entertained
his friends, played whist with Sir Horace Mann, who was his great
acquaintance, and who had known his brother at Venice as a banker, eat
macaroni which was dressed by the Venetian Consul, sang canzonettas, and
notwithstanding a wife who never pardoned him for his name, and a son
who disappointed all his plans, and who to the last hour of his life was
an enigma to him, lived till he was nearly ninety, and then died in
1817, in the full enjoyment of prolonged existence.

My grandfather retired from active business on the eve of that great
financial epoch, to grapple with which his talents were well adapted;
and when the wars and loans of the Revolution were about to create those
families of millionaires, in which he might pr