her ladyship's daughter for a mother, and Francis James Softly, Esq., M.
D. (commonly called Doctor Softly), for a father. I put my father last,
because he was not so well connected as my mother, and my grandmother
first, because she was the most nobly-born person of the three. I have
been, am still, and may continue to be, a Rogue; but I hope I am not
abandoned enough yet to forget the respect that is due to rank. On this
account, I trust, nobody will show such want of regard for my feelings
as to expect me to say much about my mother's brother. That inhuman
person committed an outrage on his family by making a fortune in the
soap and candle trade. I apologize for mentioning him, even in an
accidental way. The fact is, he left my sister, Annabella, a legacy of
rather a peculiar kind, saddled with certain conditions which indirectly
affected me; but this passage of family history need not be produced
just yet. I apologize a second time for alluding to money matters before
it was absolutely necessary. Let me get back to a pleasing and reputable
subject, by saying a word or two more about my father.

I am rather afraid that Doctor Softly was not a clever medical man; for
in spite of his great connections, he did not get a very magnificent
practice as a physician.

As a general practitioner, he might have bought a comfortable business,
with a house and snug surgery-shop attached; but the son-in-law of Lady
Malkinshaw was obliged to hold up his head, and set up his carriage, and
live in a street near a fashionable square, and keep an expensive
and clumsy footman to answer the door, instead of a cheap and tidy
housemaid. How he managed to "maintain his position" (that is the right
phrase, I think), I never could tell. His wife did not bring him a
farthing. When the honorable and gallant baronet, her father, died, he
left the widowed Lady Malkinshaw with her worldly affairs in a curiously