one day grow larger, and seize a brand to slay him? Thrice
fortunate he, to whom circumstance is made easy: whom fate visits with
gentle trial, and kindly Heaven keeps out of temptation.

In the stage which the family feud now reached, and which the biographer
of the Newcomes is bound to describe, there is one gentle moralist who
gives her sentence decidedly against Clive's father; whilst on the other
hand a rough philosopher and friend of mine, whose opinions used to have
some weight with me, stoutly declares that they were right. "War and
justice are good things," says George Warrington, rattling his clenched
fist on the table. "I maintain them, and the common sense of the world
maintains them, against the preaching of all the Honeymans that ever
puled from the pulpit. I have not the least objection in life to a rogue
being hung. When a scoundrel is whipped I am pleased, and say, serve him
right. If any gentleman will horsewhip Sir Barnes Newcome, Baronet, I
shall not be shocked, but, on the contrary, go home and order an extra
mutton-chop for dinner."

"Ah! revenge is wrong, Pen," pleads the other counsellor.

"Let alone that the wisest and best of all Judges has condemned it. It
blackens the hearts of men. It distorts their views of right. It sets
them to devise evil. It causes them to think unjustly of others. It is
not the noblest return for injury, not even the bravest way of meeting
it. The greatest courage is to bear persecution, not to answer when you
are reviled, and when wrong has been done you to forgive. I am sorry
for what you call the Colonel's triumph and his enemy's humiliation.
Let Barnes be as odious as you will, he ought never to have humiliated
Ethel's brother; but he is weak. Other gentlemen as well are weak, Mr.
Pen, although you are so much cleverer than women. I have no patience
with the Colonel, and I beg you to tell him, whether he asks you or not
that he has lost my good graces, and that I for one will not huzzah
at what his friends and flatterers call his triumphs, and that I don't
think in this instance he has acted like the dear Colonel, and the good
Colonel, and the good Christian that I once thought him."

We must now tell what the Colonel and Clive had been doing, and what
caused two such different opinions respecting their conduct from the two
critics just named. The refusal of the London Banking House to accept
the bills of the Great Indian Company of course affected very much the