The Steam-Packet: A Tale of the River and the Ocean — page 234: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE STEAM PACKET. | 177 sings all the new songs, dances all the new dances, reads all the new novels, follows all the new fashions, and is all in all with her aunt.” “And that gentleman there ?” said Mr. Pifpaf, pointing towards a middle-aged, seedy-looking, melancholy-visaged person, with a huge bamboo in his hand. | “Ah ! that person is a character—quite a character,” returned Bam- bross. ‘‘ His father, who was a clergyman, inducted him early into a knowledge of the classics and of times remote. His father spoke so well upon the reasonableness of religion, and the importance of vir- tue, that he resolved to be virtuous after the heroic models of anti- quity. The classics relieved him of some inconvenient prejudices, and led him to esteem himself a man accountable only to himself and the standard—that is, his own standard—of right and wrong. When an action seemed at first to vary from this, he had the ingenuity to recon- cile them at last; and. by practice this became perfectly easy. With the Athenian, who was tired of hearing Aristides called the Just, he was equally annoyed in seeing A‘neas always named the Pious. He had a Roman reliance upon Fortune; though, like a general with the omens on his side, he omitted no honourable means to secure the vic- tory: and therefore to favour the designs of Fortune, he always loaded the dice before he threw them. He was favourably struck with the picture that Cicero and Sallust had drawn of Catiline—‘ Greedy of — other men’s property, profuse with his own,’—and he acted accordingly. ‘His father one day, for some slight and common offence, inflicted upon him, with a birchen twig, the punishment of Marsyas. As far as he could take the trouble to remember, when he told me his history, it was borrowing a few of his father’s gold medals impressed with the head of one of the Georges—in other words, a few sovereigns, At midnight the youth took his father’s watch and the medals, and aban- doned the Penates. He hurried away as hard as he could, well know- ing that his father’s regard for him and his gold watch would cause an immediate pursuit; and had he been overtaken, the said father had also enough of the Roman to play Brutus with his son, and to improve on the past, by becoming executioner as well as Judge. Fortune led him to London, and merit procured him friends. There he married a lady who was figuratively an heiress—for she inherited from her mother a disregard of popular prejudice, that was to him her greatest attrac- tion ; though, had she lived in the Roman Commonwealth, she would hardly have been selected to watch the flame in the temple of Vesta. She incited him to industry; but it was followed by misfortune. - Truly did a great man in English history say, ‘ It is not the bee, but the wax that stings;’ for he dropped a bit of wax under his father’s bi 7 , cEomicbooks