Tales and Novels — Volume 01: Moral TalesEdgeworth, Maria
General
Tales and Novels — Volume 01: Moral Tales
Edgeworth, Maria
Fiction
Mr. Augustus Holloway, who is necessarily recalled to our notice, when
we want to personify an ill-educated young man, was, in the strictest
sense of the word, a school-boy--a clever school-boy--a good scholar--a
good historian: he wrote a good hand--read with fluency--declaimed at a
public exhibition of Westminster orators with no bad grace and emphasis,
and had always extempore words, if not extempore sense, at command. But
still he was but a school-boy. His father thought him a man, and more
than a man. Alderman Holloway prophesied to his friends that his son
Augustus would be one of the first orators in England. He was in a hurry
to have him ready to enter college, and had a borough secure for him at
the proper age. The proper age, he regretted, that parliament had fixed
to twenty-one; for the alderman was impatient to introduce his young
statesman to the house, especially as he saw honours, perhaps a title,
in the distant perspective of his son's advancement.
Whilst this vision occupied the father's imagination, a vision of
another sort played upon the juvenile fancy of his son--a vision of
a gig; for, though Augustus was but a school-boy, he had very manly
ideas--if those ideas be manly which most young men have. Lord Rawson,
the son of the Earl of Marryborough, had lately appeared to Augustus in
a gig. The young Lord Rawson had lately been a school-boy at Westminster
like Augustus: he was now master of himself and three horses at College.
Alderman Holloway had lent the Earl of Marryborough certain monies, the
interest of which the earl scrupulously paid in civility. The alderman
valued himself upon being a shrewd man; he looked to one of the earl's
boroughs as a security for his principal, and, from long-sighted
political motives, encouraged an intimacy between the young nobleman and
his son. It was one of those useful friendships, one of those fortunate
connexions, which some parents consider as the peculiar advantage of a
public school. Lord Rawson's example already powerfully operated upon
his young friend's mind, and this intimacy was most likely to have a
decisive influence upon the future destiny of Augustus. Augustus was the
son of an alderman. Lord Rawson was two years older than Holloway--had
left school--had been at college--had driven both a curricle and a
barouche, and had gone through all the gradations of coachmanship--was a
man, and had _seen the world_. How many things to excite the ambition
of a schoolboy! Augustus was impatient for the moment when he might
"be what he admired." The drudgery of Westminster, the confinement,
the ignominious appellation of _a boy_, were all insupportable to this
_young man_. He had obtained from his father a promise, that he should
leave school in a few months; but these months appeared to him an age.
It was rather a misfortune to Holloway that he was so far advanced in
his Latin and Greek studies, for he had the less to do at school; his
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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