gently. It was Colonel Esmond's nature, as he has owned in his own
biography, always to be led by a woman; and, his wife dead, he coaxed and
dandled and spoiled his daughter; laughing at her caprices, but humouring
them; making a joke of her prejudices, but letting them have their way;
indulging, and perhaps increasing, her natural imperiousness of
character, though it was his maxim that we can't change dispositions by
meddling, and only make hypocrites of our children by commanding them
over-much.

At length the time came when Mr. Esmond was to have done with the affairs
of this life, and he laid them down as if glad to be rid of their
burthen. We must not ring in an opening history with tolling bells, or
preface it with a funeral sermon. All who read and heard that discourse,
wondered where Parson Broadbent of Jamestown found the eloquence and the
Latin which adorned it. Perhaps Mr. Dempster knew, the boys' Scotch
tutor, who corrected the proofs of the oration, which was printed, by
desire of his Excellency and many persons of honour, at Mr. Franklin's
press in Philadelphia. No such sumptuous funeral had ever been seen in
the country as that which Madam Esmond Warrington ordained for her
father, who would have been the first to smile at that pompous grief. The
little lads of Castlewood, almost smothered in black trains and hatbands,
headed the procession, and were followed by my Lord Fairfax from Greenway
Court, by his Excellency the Governor of Virginia (with his coach), by
the Randolphs, the Careys, the Harrisons, the Washingtons, and many
others, for the whole county esteemed the departed gentleman, whose
goodness, whose high talents, whose benevolence and unobtrusive urbanity
had earned for him the just respect of his neighbours. When informed of
the event, the family of Colonel Esmond's stepson, the Lord Castlewood of
Hampshire in England, asked to be at the charges of the marble slab which
recorded the names and virtues of his lordship's mother and her husband;