My positive declarations that I had no influence with ministers were received with resolute scepticism. I was charged with old obligations conferred on my grandfathers and grandmothers; and, finally, had the certain knowledge that my gentlest denials were looked upon as a compound of selfishness and hypocrisy. Before a month was out, I had extended my sources of hostility to three-fourths of the kingdom, and contrived to plant in every corner some individual who looked on himself as bound to say the worst he could of his heartless, purse-proud, and abjured kinsman. I should have sturdily borne up against all this while I could keep the warfare out of my own county. But what man can abide a daily skirmish round his house? I began to think of retreating while I was yet able to show my head; for, in truth, I was sick of this perpetual belligerency. I loved to see happy human faces. I loved the meeting of those old and humble friends to whose faces, rugged as they were, I was accustomed. I liked to stop and hear the odd news of the village, and the still odder versions of London news that transpired through the lips of our established politicians. I liked an occasional visit to our little club, where the exciseman, of fifty years standing was our oracle in politics; the attorney, of about the same duration, gave us opinions on the drama, philosophy, and poetry, all equally unindebted to Aristotle; and my mild and excellent father-in-law, the curate, shook his silver locks in gentle laughter at the discussion. I loved a supper in my snug parlour with the choice half dozen; a song from my girls, and a bottle after they were gone to dream of bow-knots and bargains for the next day. But my delights were now all crushed. Another Midas, all I touched had turned to gold; and I believe in my soul that, with his gold, I got credit for his asses' ears. However, I had long felt that contempt for popular opinion which every man feels who knows of what miserable materials it is made--how much of it is mere absurdity--how much malice--how much more the frothy foolery and maudlin gossip of the empty of this empty generation. "What was it to me if the grown children of our idle community, the male babblers, and the female cutters-up of character, voted me, in their commonplace souls, the blackest of black sheep? I was still strong in the solid respect of a few worth them all." Let no man smile when I say that, on reckoning up this Theban band of sound judgment and inestimable fidelity, I found my muster reduced to three, and those three of so unromantic a class as the grey-headed exciseman, the equally grey-headed solicitor, and the curate.