"So fitted in every way to bear the burthen 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 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 improvements on the property
which the poor boy had begun, for me to finish. What do you think takes
me to Fudge and Fidget's? Sir, they are the agents for an infernal
coal mine which my cousin had reopened 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 demoralises 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 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 county 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 neighbours, if they followed his example; or at their character,
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 would be, '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 paused, and sighed heavily; then,
as his thoughts wandered into a new channel of woe, he resumed,--"Ah,
if you could but see the forlorn great house I am expected to inhabit,
cooped up between dead walls, instead of my pretty rooms, with the
windows full on the park; and the balls I am expected to give, and the
parliamentary interest I am to keep up; and the villanous proposal
made to me to become a lord steward, or lord chamberlain, because it
suits my rank to be a sort of a servant. Oh, Pisistratus! you lucky
dog--not twenty-one, and with, I dare say, not two hundred pounds
a-year in the world!"
Thus bemoaning and bewailing his sad fortunes, the poor marquis ran on,
till at last he exclaimed, in a tone of yet deeper despair,--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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