sons are usually spoiled, by too much indulgence, but by the most persevering and incessant system of bullying that ever made a poor mortal miserable. He first cowed and terrified me into nervousness, and called me a coward; then he thrashed and threatened me into stupidity, and called me a fool: so that at eighteen there are few young persons of these degenerate days who have so humble and true an opinion of themselves, as I had had dinned into me from my earliest years. I slunk about the old court-yard of the house, or lay behind stacks in the farm-yard, or sat whole days in a deserted attic, and never went willingly near my father--the only other inhabitant of the mansion--and was never enquired after by him. If I saw him, I trembled--if I heard his voice, I felt inclined to fly to the other end of the house; and at last, if I heard any one else speak a little louder than ordinary, I was fain to betake me to some distant room, or even hide in a tangled plantation called the Wilderness, at the other end of the park. The house was immensely large, or rather the property was immensely small; farm after farm had been sold by great-grandfathers and grandfathers; but as they had not the sense to pull down a side of the mansion for every estate they parted with, it had at last grown an encumbrance. There was a residence fit for a man of ten thousand a-year, and a rental of about eight hundred--the helmet of Otranto on the head of Sir Geoffrey Hudson. If I could have been a bishop, or even a dean, and laid by four or five thousand a-year--such were my father's views of me, and of ecclesiastical preferment--I might buy back some of the ancient land and repair the house, and that was the reason he determined I should go into the church; for it is to be observed, that fathers have extraordinary eyes when directed to the future fortunes of their sons. They seem to have no power of seeing small curacy-houses filled with twelve children, and butchers and bakers walking down the avenue in a melancholy and despairing manner at Christmas time; but have pertinaciously before their sight a superb mansion in James's Square, with a steady old coach and two fat horses at the door; or a fine old turreted palace at Lambeth, with five or six chaplains contesting the honour of the last lick of the plate. Not a glimpse can they discover of the cold rides--miserable scenes among the dying, the idle, the dissolute--hope deferred--strength decaying--the proud man's contumely, the rich vulgarian's scorn--struggle, struggle! toil and trouble! Blessings, say I, on the outspoken head of St John's, and the impenetrability of Euclid, that kept a blue coat on my back, and disappointed my father's expectation of seeing me Lord Bishop of Durham. I should have been chaplain to a poor-house to a certainty, and have envied my parishioners; but I doubt very much, in the mean time, if the chaplain of a poor-house would have envied me, imprisoned and pauperized in Rayleigh Court.