according to the fashion of the time, but I think it is a good letter in
its way, and believe it to have been perfectly sincere. No doubt my
father fully intended to reform his way of life, but it is easier to
make a good resolution than to adhere to it. I do not know enough of the
degree of excess to which his love of pleasure led him, to be able to
describe his life as a young man accurately, but as my mother had been
well brought up and was a refined person for her rank in society, I
conclude that she would not have encouraged a notorious evil-liver.
Those who knew my father in his early manhood have told me that he was
very popular, and yet at the same time that he bore himself with
considerable dignity, one old lady going so far as to say that when he
walked through the main street at Shaw, it seemed as if all the town
belonged to him. It is difficult for us to understand quite accurately
the social code of the Georgian era, when a man might indulge in
pleasures which seem to us coarse and degrading, and yet retain all the
pride and all the bearing of a gentleman.

The marriage took place according to the fixed resolution of the
contracting parties, and their life together was immensely happy during
the short time that it lasted. Most unfortunately it came to an end
after little more than one year by my mother's lamentably premature
death. I happen to possess a letter from my father's sister to her
sister Anne in which she gives an account of this event, and print it
because it conveys the reality more vividly than a narrative at second
hand. The reader will pardon the reference to myself. It matters nothing
to a dead man--as I shall be when this page is printed--whether at the
age of fourteen days he was considered a fine-looking child or a
weakling.

"_Friday Morning._