increasing, exhibited a disposition narrowing at times into a
selfishness the most pitiful. He did not, it is true, forego or forget
any of those habits of freedom and intercourse in his household and with
those about him, which form so large a practice among the people of the
south. He could give a dinner, and furnish an ostentatious
entertainment--lodge his guest in the style of a prince for weeks
together, nor exhibit a feature likely to induce a thought of intrusion
in the mind of his inmate. In public, the populace had no complaints to
urge of his penuriousness; and in all outward shows he manifested the
same general characteristics which marked the habit of the class to
which he belonged.

But his selfishness lay in things not so much on the surface. It was
more deep and abiding in its character; and consisted in the false
estimate which he made of the things around him. He had learned to value
wealth as a substitute for mind--for morals--for all that is lofty, and
all that should be leading, in the consideration of society. He valued
few things beside. He had different emotions for the rich from those
which he entertained for the poor; and, from perceiving that among men,
money could usurp all places--could defeat virtue, command respect
denied to morality and truth, and secure a real worship when the Deity
must be content with shows and symbols--he gradually gave it the chief
place in his regard. He valued wealth as the instrument of authority. It
secured him power; a power, however, which he had no care to employ, and
which he valued only as tributary to the maintenance of that haughty
ascendency over men which was his heart's first passion. He was neither
miser nor mercenary; he did not labor to accumulate--perhaps because he
was a lucky accumulator without any painstaking of his own: but he was,
by nature an aristocrat, and not unwilling to compel respect through the
means of money, as through any other more noble agency of intellect or