Further comment is needless. A more honest, simple, clever,
warm-hearted, soft, whimsical, romantical, high-spirited young
fellow than John Perkins did not exist. When his father, Doctor
Perkins, died, this, his only son, was placed under the care of John
Perkins, Esquire, of the house of Perkins, Scully, and Perkins,
those celebrated attorneys in the trading town of Oldborough, which
the second partner, William Pitt Scully, Esquire, represented in
Parliament and in London.

All John's fortune was the house in Bedford Row, which, at his
father's death, was let out into chambers, and brought in a clear
hundred a year. Under his uncle's roof at Oldborough, where he
lived with thirteen red-haired male and female cousins, he was only
charged fifty pounds for board, clothes, and pocket-money, and the
remainder of his rents was carefully put by for him until his
majority. When he approached that period--when he came to belong to
two spouting-clubs at Oldborough, among the young merchants and
lawyers'-clerks--to blow the flute nicely, and play a good game at
billiards--to have written one or two smart things in the Oldborough
Sentinel--to be fond of smoking (in which act he was discovered by
his fainting aunt at three o'clock one morning)--in one word, when
John Perkins arrived at manhood, he discovered that he was quite
unfit to be an attorney, that he detested all the ways of his
uncle's stern, dull, vulgar, regular, red-headed family, and he
vowed that he would go to London and make his fortune. Thither he
went, his aunt and cousins, who were all "serious," vowing that he
was a lost boy; and when his history opens, John had been two years
in the metropolis, inhabiting his own garrets; and a very nice
compact set of apartments, looking into the back-garden, at this
moment falling vacant, the prudent Lucy Gorgon had visited them, and