Page:The Ladies' Cabinet of Fashion, Music & Romance 1832.pdf/4

Rh piness, he took it in dudgeon, and quarrelled outright with this Mundane Terrene." I have heard that his first impulse towards money-making, was the hope of gaining a young lady who had long been the object of his affections, but who disliked his poverty more than she liked his person. He married her at last, but they had waited too long. My father was forty-five, and my mother only ten years younger. At these years it requires a good deal of rubbing to smooth the asperities of old habits. The first disappointment of my father, was in finding that he had been labouring fifteen years to get a wife, who actually sometimes contradicted him, as he verily believed, without reason. What is the use of money, said he, if it don't make a man always right? But though he was not exactly satisfied with his bargain, he loved my mother, and when she died, he was still more disappointed than at his marriage. He shut himself up in an old garret, where he continued to exist, and his money to accumulate, till I grew almost an old man myself, when he died, leaving me a fortune I knew not what to do with, any more than a child.

I was about twelve years old at the death of my mother, and more than thirty when my father died almost at the period of four score and ten. From the time he shut himself up in his garret, I became in some degree my own master in all things, except spending money, which, though my father despised, he yet hoarded with the devotion of a miser. He let me do just as I pleased, provided my bills did not amount to more than was absolutely necessary. I went to school, but only when and where I pleased ; I floated about with the wind and tide like a lazy ship at anchor ; I learned no profession ; I knew nothing of the business of this world, and I did nothing, except just what I pleased. I hated study- I hated exercise- I hated noise-I hated company- and above all, I hated trouble. I read, it is true, a piece of a book here, and a piece there, and not unfrequently I had half a dozen works in hand at once, none of which I ever finished. So variable and fastidious was my appetite for books, that I sometimes spent whole mornings at a public library, without being able to select one to my satisfaction.

If I had any decided taste, it was for drawing ; but this, like all my other propensities, was under the dominion of a busy idleness, that would not permit of anything like a constant attention to one object, but led me by a sort of irresistible influence, from doing nothing in one place to doing nothing in another. Sometimes after sitting for hours, in a becalmed state