That I may therefore gratify you with an imitation of your own syllables
of sadness, I will inform you that I was condemned by some disastrous
influence to be an only son, born to the apparent prospect of a large
fortune, and allotted to my parents at that time of life when satiety of
common diversions allows the mind to indulge parental affection with
greater intenseness. My birth was celebrated by the tenants with feasts,
and dances, and bag-pipes: congratulations were sent from every family
within ten miles round; and my parents discovered in my first cries such
tokens of future virtue and understanding, that they declared themselves
determined to devote the remaining part of life to my happiness and the
increase of their estate.
The abilities of my father and mother were not perceptibly unequal, and
education had given neither much advantage over the other. They had both
kept good company, rattled in chariots, glittered in playhouses, and
danced at court, and were both expert in the games that were in their
time called in as auxiliaries against the intrusion of thought.
When there is such a parity between two persons associated for life, the
dejection which the husband, if he be not completely stupid, must always
suffer for want of superiority, sinks him to submissiveness.
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