igion; and certain
confabulations with his parson, his household, his harvest-home
tenantry, and local preachers of dissent and schism; his creed,
practice, and favourable samples of daily life. Moreover, our squire
should have somewhat to tell of personal history and adventures; a youth
of poor dependence on a miser uncle; a storm-tost early manhood,
consequent on his high uncompromising principles; then the miser's
death, without the base injustice of that cruel will, which an
eleventh-hour penitence destroyed: the squire comes to his property,
marries his one old flame, effects reformations, attains popularity,
happiness, and other due prosperities. Anecdotes of particular passages,
as in affliction or in joy; his son lamed for life, or his house half
burnt down, his attack by highwaymen, or election for parliament. The
squire's general confidence in man, sympathy with frailties, and success
in regenerating long-lost characters. His discourse on field sports,
displaying the amiable intellectuality of a Gilbert White as opposed to
the blood-thirsty Nimrodism and Ramrodism of a mad Mytton. A marriage; a
funeral; a disputed legacy of some eccentric relative; with its
agreeable concomitants of heartless selfish strife, rebuked by the
squire's noble example: the conventicle gently put down by dint of
gradual desertions, and church-going as tenderly extended; vestry
demagogues and parochial incendiaries chastised by our squire; and
divers other adventures, conversations, situations, and conditions,
illustrative of that grand character, a fine old English gentleman, all
of the olden time.

Altogether, if well managed, a book like this would be calculated to do
substantial good in these days of no principle or bad principle. A
captivating example well applied--witness the uses of biography--is
infectious among the well-inclined and well-informed. But--but--but--I
fancy there may exist, and do exist already, admirable books of just
this character. I have heard of, but not seen, '_The Portrait of a
Christian Gentleman_,' and another '_of a Churchman_:' doubtless, these,
combined with a sort of Mr. Dovedale in that clever impossible
'_Floreston_,' or an equally unnatural and charming Sir Charles
Grandison, with a dash of scenery and a sprinkle of anecdote, would
make up, far better than I could fabricate, the fair fine character that
once I thought to sketch. Moreover, to a plain gentleman, living in the
country, of perfectly