Our author now returned home to enter on possession of his estates, and
to attempt to reduce to something like order the chaos in which the
family affairs were. He resolved to commit the management of his
property to trustees, who, after paying his mother's jointure, were to
devote the whole of the rest of the rents to the reduction of debt. He
himself went to live on the Continent, in the hope that in a few years
he would be able to return home and enjoy his inheritance unencumbered
by debt. These proceedings, with the disappointing results that followed
them, are related in a passage of his _Logopandecteision_, which is
worth quoting. "Immediately after my father's decease," he says, "for my
better expedition in the discharge of those burthens, having repaired
homewards, I did sequestrate the whole rent (my mother's joynture
excepted) to that use only, and, as I had done many times before, betook
myself to my hazards abroad, that by vertue of the industry and
diligence of those whom, by the advise and deliberation of my nearest
friends, I was induced to intrust with my affairs, the debt might be the
sooner defrayed, and the ancient house releeved out of the thraldome it
was so unluckily faln into. But it fell out so far otherwayes, that
after some few years residence abroad, without any considerable expence
from home, when I thought, because of my having mortified and set apart
all the rent to no other end then [than] the cutting off and defalking
of my father's debt, that accordingly a great part of my father's debt
had been discharged, I was so far disappointed of my expectation therin,
that whilst, conform to the confidence reposed in him whom I had
intrusted with my affairs, I hoped to have been exonered and relieved of
many creditors, the debt was only past over and transferred from one in
favours of another, or rather of many in the favours of one, who, though
he formerly had gained much at my father's hands, was notwithstanding at
the time of his decease none of his creditors, nor at any time mine; my
Egyptian bondage by such means remaining still the same, under task
masters different only in name, and the rents neverthelesse taken up to
the full, to my no small detriment and prejudice of the house standing
in my person. The aime of some of those I concredited [committed] my
weightiest adoes [affairs] unto, being, as is most conspicuously
apparent, that I should never reap the fruition nor enjoyment of any
portion, parcell, or pendicle of the estate of my predecessors, unlesse
by my fortune and endeavours in forrain countries, I should be able to
acquire as much as might suffice to buy it, as we say, out of the
ground. And verily," he concludes, "though not in relation to these
ignoble and unworthy by-ends, it was my purpose and resolution to have
done so, which assuredly, had not the turbulent divisions of the time
been such as to have crossed and thwarted the atchievements of more
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