merely by reporting faithfully the facts of this early experience, I
could hardly prevent the reader from receiving an impression as of
some higher rank than did really belong to my family. And this
impression might seem to have been designedly insinuated by myself.

My father was a merchant; not in the sense of Scotland, where it means
a retail dealer, one, for instance, who sells groceries in a cellar,
but in the English sense, a sense rigorously exclusive; that is, he
was a man engaged in _foreign_ commerce, and no other; therefore, in
_wholesale_ commerce, and no other--which last limitation of the idea
is important, because it brings him within the benefit of Cicero's
condescending distinction [2] as one who ought to be despised certainly,
but not too intensely to be despised even by a Roman senator. He--this
imperfectly despicable man--died at an early age, and very soon after the
incidents recorded in this chapter, leaving to his family, then
consisting of a wife and six children, an unburdened estate producing
exactly sixteen hundred pounds a year. Naturally, therefore, at the date
of my narrative,--whilst he was still living,--he had an income very much
larger, from the addition of current commercial profits. Now, to any man
who is acquainted with commercial life as it exists in England, it will
readily occur that in an opulent English family of that class--opulent,
though not emphatically _rich_ in a mercantile estimate--the domestic
economy is pretty sure to move upon a scale of liberality altogether
unknown amongst the corresponding orders in foreign nations. The
establishment of servants, for instance, in such houses, measured even
_numerically_ against those establishments in other nations, would
somewhat surprise the foreign appraiser, simply as interpreting the
relative station in society occupied by the English merchant. But this
same establishment, when measured by the quality and amount of the
provision made for its comfort and even elegant accommodation, would fill