they were born." My uncle was now only at a loss what to do with his
wife,--that remaining treasure, whose readiness to oblige him had been
so miraculously evinced. She saved him the trouble of long cogitation,
an exercise of intellect to which he was never too ardently inclined.
There was a gentleman of the court, celebrated for his sedateness and
solemnity; my aunt was piqued into emulating Orpheus, and, six weeks
after her confinement, she put this rock into motion,--they eloped.
Poor gentleman! it must have been a severe trial of patience to a man
never known before to transgress the very slowest of all possible walks,
to have had two events of the most rapid nature happen to him in the
same week: scarcely had he recovered the shock of being run away with by
my aunt, before, terminating forever his vagrancies, he was run through
by my uncle. The wits made an epigram upon the event, and my uncle, who
was as bold as a lion at the point of a sword, was, to speak frankly,
terribly disconcerted by the point of a jest. He retired to the country
in a fit of disgust and gout. Here his natural goodness soon recovered
the effects of the artificial atmosphere to which it had been exposed,
and he solaced himself by righteously governing domains worthy of a
prince, for the mortifications he had experienced in the dishonourable
career of a courtier.

Hitherto I have spoken somewhat slightingly of my uncle, and in his
dissipation he deserved it, for he was both too honest and too simple to
shine in that galaxy of prostituted genius of which Charles II. was the
centre. But in retirement he was no longer the same person; and I do
not think that the elements of human nature could have furnished forth a
more amiable character than Sir William Devereux presiding at Christmas
over the merriment of his great hall.

Good old man! his very defects were what we loved best in him: vanity