friends had often extolled: they were now incumbrances in a walk of
life where the dull and the ignorant passed him at every turn; his
fancy and his feeling were invincible obstacles to eminence in a
situation where his fancy had no room for exertion, and his feeling
experienced perpetual disgust. But these murmurings he never
suffered to be heard; and that he might not offend the prudence of
those who had been concerned in the choice of his profession, he
continued to labour in it several years, till, by the death of a
relation, he succeeded to an estate of a little better than 100
pounds a year, with which, and the small patrimony left him, he
retired into the country, and made a love-match with a young lady of
a similar temper to his own, with whom the sagacious world pitied
him for finding happiness.

"But his elder brother, whom you are to see at supper, if you will
do us the favour of your company, was naturally impetuous, decisive,
and overbearing. He entered into life with those ardent
expectations by which young men are commonly deluded: in his
friendships, warm to excess; and equally violent in his dislikes.
He was on the brink of marriage with a young lady, when one of those
friends, for whose honour he would have pawned his life, made an
elopement with that very goddess, and left him besides deeply
engaged for sums which that good friend's extravagance had
squandered.

"The dreams he had formerly enjoyed were now changed for ideas of a
very different nature. He abjured all confidence in anything of
human form; sold his lands, which still produced him a very large
reversion, came to town, and immured himself, with a woman who had
been his nurse, in little better than a garret; and has ever since