Chapter 3 - Page 2

expect. Most of my
vacations were spent at his rectory; for he had first married, then
become a father, next a widower, and had exchanged his town living
for one in the country, between the periods of my mother's death and
that on my going to Eton; and, after I quitted Oxford, much more of
my time was passed beneath his friendly roof than beneath that of my
own parent. Indeed, I saw little of the latter. He paid my bills,
furnished me with pocket-money, and professed an intention to let me
travel after I should reach my majority. But, satisfied with these
proofs of paternal care, he appeared willing to let me pursue my own
course very much in my own way.

My ancestor was an eloquent example of the truth of that political
dogma which teaches the efficacy of the division of labor. No
manufacturer of the head of a pin ever attained greater dexterity in
his single-minded vocation than was reached by my father in the one
pursuit to which he devoted, as far as human ken could reach, both
soul and body. As any sense is known to increase in acuteness by
constant exercise, or any passion by indulgence, so did his ardor in
favor of the great object of his affections grow with its growth,
and become more manifest as an ordinary observer would be apt to
think the motive of its existence at all had nearly ceased. This is
a moral phenomenon that I have often had occasion to observe, and
which, there is some reason to think, depends on a principle of
attraction that has hitherto escaped the sagacity of the
philosophers, but which is as active in the immaterial, as is that
of gravitation in the material world. Talents like his, so
incessantly and unweariedly employed, produced the usual fruits. He
grew richer hourly, and at the time of which I speak he was pretty
generally known to the initiated to be the warmest man who had
anything to do with the stock exchange.

I do not think that the opinions of my ancestor underwent as many
material changes between the ages of fifty and seventy as they had
undergone between the ages of ten and forty. During the latter
period the tree of life usually gets deep root, its inclination is
fixed, whether obtained by bending to the storms, or by drawing
toward the light; and it probably yields more in fruits of its own,
than it gains by tillage and manuring. Still my ancestor was not
exactly the same man the day he kept his seventieth birthday as he
had been the day he kept his fiftieth. In the first place, he was
worth thrice the money at the former period that he had been worth
at the latter. Of course his moral system had undergone all the
mutations that are known to be dependent on a change of this
important character. Beyond a question, during the last five-and-