characteristic imitativeness, to cite the finest sentiments he had found
in his plays; and novels. What father is not credulous? Roland
believed, and wept tears of joy. And now he thought the time was come
to take back the boy,--to return with a worthy heir to the old Tower.
He thanked and blessed the tutor; he took the son. But under pretence
that he had yet some things to master, whether in book knowledge or
manly accomplishments, the youth begged his father at all events not yet
to return to England,--to let him attend his tutor daily for some
months. Roland consented, moved from his old quarters, and took a
lodging for both in the same suburb as that in which the teacher
resided. But soon, when they were under one roof, the boy's habitual
tastes, and his repugnance to all paternal authority, were betrayed. To
do my unhappy cousin justice (such as that justice is), though he had
the cunning for a short disguise, he had not the hypocrisy to maintain
systematic deceit. He could play a part for a while, from an exulting
joy in his own address; but he could not wear a mask with the patience
of cold-blooded dissimulation. Why enter into painful details, so
easily divined by the intelligent reader? The faults of the son were
precisely those to which Roland would be least indulgent. To the
ordinary scrapes of high-spirited boyhood no father, I am sure, would
have been more lenient; but to anything that seemed low, petty,--that
grated on him as a gentleman and soldier,--there, not for worlds would I
have braved the darkness of his frown, and the woe that spoke like scorn
in his voice. And when, after all warning and prohibition were in vain,
Roland found his son in the middle of the night in a resort of gamblers
and sharpers, carrying all before him with his cue, in the full flush of
triumph, and a great heap of five-franc pieces before him, you may
conceive with what wrath the proud, hasty, passionate man drove out,
cane in hand, the obscene associates, flinging after them the son's ill-
gotten gains; and with what resentful humiliation the son was compelled