Her father and family lived in that quiet and learned retirement which neither sought nor invited, as they did not require, the excitement of continual company, to enable them to get through life without weariness. A tasteful and elegant, though simple, home afforded to them far higher pleasures than all the genteel riot and conventional affectations of happiness which occupy so much of the time and attention of the great body of that class of society to which they belonged, and in which they might have shone so gracefully conspicuous. But Mr. Calvert the father was too much a man of mind to precipitate either himself or his family into the whirl and eddy of what may be termed fashionable life. At the risk of being thought dull and spiritless,--of having his daughters neglected, and his sons regarded as “very unlike what one naturally expects young men would be,”--he preferred to all other pleasures that sound moral and mental education of his children,--that social, or domestic, training of them up, and that quiet and pleasing attention to the whole economy of his estate, and of all who were on it, which, whatever its defects in the eyes of the world, never fails to produce the greatest amount of real happiness to the possessors, as well as to render them the most capable of becoming the sources of greatest happiness to others. Hence, his daughters had never been presented a dozen times, if not ostensibly, at least virtually, like bills for acceptance, but to be refused. Neither had his two sons--for two he had--any knowledge of those peculiar vices which, though they might have added to their character as young men of spirit, could not by any means have done them credit on any other account. Besides their own mutual stores of ever fresh mental enjoyment, this happy and well-judging little family found abundant recreation in a large and admirable library, which Mr. Calvert had himself selected: as well as amusement in an old-fashioned garden of extensive dimensions which enclosed the house on three sides, and overshadowed the roof with its tall elm trees,--planted there perhaps in the days of Addison; and which threw a quiet secluded air over the whole scene. Mr. Calvert's taste, indeed, was so far that of the time to which I have alluded, that Miss Jenny had been so christened after some favourite in the _Spectator_; while the eldest son Roger had, in like manner, received his cognomen though his father's veneration at once for the genius of Addison and his admiration of the character of Sir Roger de Coverley. When Jane once jerked her pincushion into the pond, he reminded her of some tale of a watch being similarly dealt by, as told in his favourite book; and not unfrequently spoke of that particular age of British literature as one in which he should have been most happy if it had been his fortune to live.