This was the first commencement of my friendship with Adrian, and I must
commemorate this day as the most fortunate of my life. I now began to be
human. I was admitted within that sacred boundary which divides the
intellectual and moral nature of man from that which characterizes animals.
My best feelings were called into play to give fitting responses to the
generosity, wisdom, and amenity of my new friend. He, with a noble goodness
all his own, took infinite delight in bestowing to prodigality the
treasures of his mind and fortune on the long-neglected son of his father's
friend, the offspring of that gifted being whose excellencies and talents
he had heard commemorated from infancy.

After his abdication the late king had retreated from the sphere of
politics, yet his domestic circle afforded him small content. The ex-queen
had none of the virtues of domestic life, and those of courage and daring
which she possessed were rendered null by the secession of her husband: she
despised him, and did not care to conceal her sentiments. The king had, in
compliance with her exactions, cast off his old friends, but he had
acquired no new ones under her guidance. In this dearth of sympathy, he had
recourse to his almost infant son; and the early development of talent and
sensibility rendered Adrian no unfitting depository of his father's
confidence. He was never weary of listening to the latter's often repeated
accounts of old times, in which my father had played a distinguished part;
his keen remarks were repeated to the boy, and remembered by him; his wit,
his fascinations, his very faults were hallowed by the regret of affection;
his loss was sincerely deplored. Even the queen's dislike of the favourite
was ineffectual to deprive him of his son's admiration: it was bitter,
sarcastic, contemptuous--but as she bestowed her heavy censure alike on
his virtues as his errors, on his devoted friendship and his ill-bestowed
loves, on his disinterestedness and his prodigality, on his pre-possessing