Pontifex felt this as regards his children and his money. His money was
never naughty; his money never made noise or litter, and did not spill
things on the tablecloth at meal times, or leave the door open when it
went out. His dividends did not quarrel among themselves, nor was he
under any uneasiness lest his mortgages should become extravagant on
reaching manhood and run him up debts which sooner or later he should
have to pay. There were tendencies in John which made him very uneasy,
and Theobald, his second son, was idle and at times far from truthful.
His children might, perhaps, have answered, had they known what was in
their father's mind, that he did not knock his money about as he not
infrequently knocked his children. He never dealt hastily or pettishly
with his money, and that was perhaps why he and it got on so well
together.

It must be remembered that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the
relations between parents and children were still far from satisfactory.
The violent type of father, as described by Fielding, Richardson,
Smollett and Sheridan, is now hardly more likely to find a place in
literature than the original advertisement of Messrs. Fairlie &
Pontifex's "Pious Country Parishioner," but the type was much too
persistent not to have been drawn from nature closely. The parents in
Miss Austen's novels are less like savage wild beasts than those of her
predecessors, but she evidently looks upon them with suspicion, and an
uneasy feeling that _le pere de famille est capable de tout_ makes itself
sufficiently apparent throughout the greater part of her writings. In
the Elizabethan time the relations between parents and children seem on
the whole to have been more kindly. The fathers and the sons are for the
most part friends in Shakespeare, nor does the evil appear to have
reached its full abomination till a long course of Puritanism had
familiarised men's minds with Jewish ideals as those which we should