"So fitted in every way to bear the burden of the great Castleton name
and property. And yet you see it killed him! Ah! if he had been but a
simple gentleman, or if he had had a less conscientious desire to do his
duties, he would have lived to a good old age. I know what it is
already. Oh, if you saw the piles of letters on my table! I positively
dread the post. Such colossal improvement on the property which the
poor boy had began, for me to finish. What do you think takes me to
Fudge & Fidget's? Sir, they are the agents for an infernal coal-mine
which my cousin had re-opened in Durham, to plague my life out with
another thirty thousand pounds a year! How am I to spend the money?--
how am I to spend it? There's a cold-blooded head steward who says that
charity is the greatest crime a man in high station can commit,--it
demoralizes the poor. Then, because some half-a-dozen farmers sent me a
round-robin to the effect that their rents were too high, and I wrote
them word that the rents should be lowered, there was such a hullabaloo,
you would have thought heaven and earth were coming together. 'If a man
in the position of the Marquis of Castleton set the example of letting
land below its value, how could the poorer squires in the country exist?
Or if they did exist, what injustice to expose them to the charge that
they were grasping landlords, vampires, and bloodsuckers! Clearly if
Lord Castleton lowered his rents (they were too low already), he struck
a mortal blow at the property of his neighbors if they followed his
example, or at their characters if they did not.' No man can tell how
hard it is to do good, unless fortune gives him a hundred thousand
pounds a-year, and says--'Now, do good with it!' Sedley Beaudesert
might follow his whims, and all that would be said against him was
'good-natured, simple fellow!' But if Lord Castleton follow his whims,
you would think he was a second Catiline,--unsettling the peace and
undermining the prosperity of the entire nation!" Here the wretched man