Astonished at her son’s promise, dazzled by the hopes of his preferment, all Mrs. Spimkins’s usual good sense forsook her. The wisdom of the world was lost in the feelings of the mother. She gave play at once to the most ambitious expectations, and resolved henceforth not to let an hour escape without striving to inoculate her husband. With this view, she called every possible resource to her aid. She appealed to his affection as a father, to his pride as a man; she pointed out the injustice, not to say the inhumanity, of thwarting the genius of Thomas; she talked of his wealth, his deserts, his dignities; and, finally, by some miracle, for which I have never yet been able to account, persuaded the old gentleman to relax so liberally in his anti-poetic notions, as to despatch Thomas to Oxford, where he would infallibly have gained the prize poem, had it not, by some unaccountable mistake, been transferred to another. It is from this period that the historian of the Spimkinses must date their decline and fall. Thomas returned home in due time from the university, a finished genius, but as poor as such geniuses are apt to be; while his father, who now began to repent having sent him there, proposed buying him a share in a grocer’s shop at Whitechapel. But the gifted youth disdained such base employment. He had a soul above figs! What! Thomas Spimkins, Esq., of Brazen Nose, author of a poem which was within an inch of gaining the Chancellor’s prize, stand behind the counter in a white apron, answering the demands of some uneducated customer for “a quarter of a pound of moist sugar, and change for sixpence!” Impossible! the idea was revolting to humanity!