Puslapio vaizdai
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"not adorned, inlarged, or hyperbolized the matter "in a lyne or word: my free genius is at endlesse

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enmity with such baseness; flatterers I hold to bee "the basest of slaves: I have commended nothing "to posterity but what I have found of record, or "taken from venerable manuscripts, or the sealed "deeds of men."

CHAPTER II.

HERBERT REARDON.

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Ambitiously ye take a taske in hand,

"Whose greatness with my weakness cannot stand:
"Ye walk a wayłess way, with untrod pace,
"Which yet noe former man with foot did trace:
"Ye travell where noe path is to be seene,
"Of any humane stepp that there hath beene.

SMITH'S MSS.

Apud Castro de Berkeley.

I was born on the 20th of May, in the year of God 1449, at my father's house, in the county of Gloucester, at the little village of Aust, in the parish of Henbury, within a few hundred yards of the passage over the River Severn, distant about twelve miles from Bristol, twenty-five from Gloucester, and three miles from Thornbury. The house was prettily situated, and screened from the cutting winds that sweep the tides of the Severn, by the Aust cliff rising a hundred feet above the level of

the river, and stretching for more than a mile along the shore. Within view of the windows of our house, and situated on the summit of the cliff, were some ruins of an ancient chapel supposed to be coeval with those on the rock on the opposite side of the river;* but which, from the wasting of the cliff have, during my life, buried themselves in the waters beneath, or been broken into fragments by the extent and depth of their fall.

An only son, I was brought up with all the care and attention that the easy competency of my parents enabled them to bestow; for my father, though educated in the legal profession, having acquired a sufficient fortune by the death of a distant relative, had relinquished his general practice, and only confined himself to a certain routine of business, which served rather to occupy than to enslave his daily hours; and, in fact, the affairs of the Berkeley family alone were those to which he had of late given any attention.

* Called the Chapel Rock to this day, from the ruins still to be seen.-ED.

When I was six years old, there was (to me) a most agreeable addition made to our family circle, in the shape of a cousin, by the mother's side. Isabel Mead, for such was her name, was three years older than myself, and a most beautiful child. Her mother having died scarcely a twelve-month before, with her last breath, had obtained a promise from her husband, Mr. Mead, that the young Isabel should be consigned to the care of her aunt, till such time as she should be of a sufficient age to be placed as a companion to a lady, whose name was also bequeathed to my mother in a sealed packet, and which was not to be opened for twelve years. My parents were soon as much charmed with their adopted daughter as I was; for indeed, hard must the heart have been that could see the motherless child smiling up through her sparkling tears, at the warmth of the expressions lavished upon her by her aunt, in the first hour of her arrival, and not long to supply the tenderness she had lost in the grave.

Although her father, at first, felt some pangs at

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parting with his only child (a brother having died in infancy), still upon the whole, and from opinions since formed, I believe it was an arrangement which suited his disposition and pursuits; for though of an ancient Somersetshire family, his ideas were thoroughly mercantile; every thought he had was swallowed up in the speculations of trade, and indeed, he deemed all hours thrown away that were otherwise employed. One other feeling alone, at times cast a nobler light upon his mind, and that was a hatred of tyranny, and a supreme contempt for what he was pleased to call the knight-errantry of the times, and the feudal and overbearing dominion of the English nobility. Against these he was for ever lifting up his voice, and at all times, as occasion offered, he lost no opportunity of thwarting what he termed an undue assumption of power. His feelings on this subject often brought him in contact with the feudal interests of his neighbourhood, and, since his residence in Bristol, involved him with Lord Stafford, and

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