is first necessary that I should say more about the members of my
family. Two of them, at least, will be found important to the progress
of events in these pages. I make no attempt to judge their characters:
I only describe them--whether rightly or wrongly, I know not--as they
appeared to me.

III.

I always considered my father--I speak of him in the past tense,
because we are now separated for ever; because he is henceforth as
dead to me as if the grave had closed over him--I always considered my
father to be the proudest man I ever knew; the proudest man I ever
heard of. His was not that conventional pride, which the popular
notions are fond of characterising by a stiff, stately carriage; by a
rigid expression of features; by a hard, severe intonation of voice;
by set speeches of contempt for poverty and rags, and rhapsodical
braggadocio about rank and breeding. My father's pride had nothing of
this about it. It was that quiet, negative, courteous, inbred pride,
which only the closest observation could detect; which no ordinary
observers ever detected at all.

Who that observed him in communication with any of the farmers on any
of his estates--who that saw the manner in which he lifted his hat,
when he accidentally met any of those farmers' wives--who that noticed
his hearty welcome to the man of the people, when that man happened to
be a man of genius--would have thought him proud? On such occasions as
these, if he had any pride, it was impossible to detect it. But seeing
him when, for instance, an author and a new-made peer of no ancestry
entered his house together--observing merely the entirely different
manner in which he shook hands with each--remarking that the polite