had been the day he kept his fiftieth. In the first place, he was
worth thrice the money at the former period that he had been worth
at the latter. Of course his moral system had undergone all the
mutations that are known to be dependent on a change of this
important character. Beyond a question, during the last five-and-
twenty years of the life of my ancestor, his political bias, too,
was in favor of exclusive privileges and exclusive benefits. I do
not mean that he was an aristocrat in the vulgar acceptation. To
him, feudality was a blank; he had probably never heard the word.
Portcullises rose and fell, flanking towers lifted their heads, and
embattled walls swept around their fabrics in vain, so far as his
imagination was concerned. He cared not for the days of courts leet
and courts baron; nor for the barons themselves; nor for the honors
of a pedigree (why should he?--no prince in the land could more
clearly trace his family into obscurity than himself), nor for the
vanities of a court, nor for those of society; nor for aught else of
the same nature that is apt to have charms for the weak-minded, the
imaginative, or the conceited. His political prepossessions showed
themselves in a very different manner. Throughout the whole of the
five lustres I have named, he was never heard to whisper a censure
against government, let its measures, or the character of its
administration, be what it would. It was enough for him that it was
government. Even taxation no longer excited his ire, nor aroused his
eloquence. He conceived it to be necessary to order, and especially
to the protection of property, a branch of political science that he
had so studied as to succeed in protecting his own estate, in a
measure, against even this great ally itself. After he became worth
a million, it was observed that all his opinions grew less favorable
to mankind in general, and that he was much disposed to exaggerate
the amount and quality of the few boons which Providence has