Mrs. Montagu, the Junonian finisher of the daughters of the land, had got rid of two awkward appendages to her establishment, and tried her system more successfully on better materials. Her fame spread far and wide, till it reached the Andes. She went to South America, under a personal guarantee from Simon Bolivar, that he would pay her ten thousand dollars a year, if she could not make it herself, and provided it could be got out of the public treasury. It is not at all my fashion, as I have told my readers, to select specific moralities as texts to be illustrated by narrative and example. I have always held that the interests of morals are better served in general by painting vice and virtue as they occur in actual life-strangely mixed with one another-frequently struggling together for the mastery in the same breast-our virtues sometimes leading to misfortune, sometimes degraded by weakness-our vices often made splendid by union with noble qualities, and not always receiving their judgment here. But in the present instance, my purpose has been to relate a series of actual adventures, which I happened to witness, and which I felt myself bound to record purely for the sake of the regular and useful moral lesson which every character and incident unfolds, and the strict poetical justice with which falsehood and vanity brought upon themselves their own punishment. The silly arts of the son, the weak falsehood of the father, and the ambitious vanity of the mother, all severally contribu ted their due share in bringing ridicule, disappointment and mortification upon the whole family. The root of the follies of all was vanity. That of Hippolyte was ridiculous. That of poor Firkins more inclines me to mourn than to smile. A memory enviable alike for its tenacity and its quickness-learning, not at all select, not very profound, nor all of it very accurate, but truly admirable for abundance, copiousness and variety—an insatiable thirst for knowledge, industry untiring and indefatigable, a never flagging vivacity of spirits, great command of language, some power of elocution—all these, under the guidance of a sober intellect and a due estimate of himself, would have made him distinguished as a teacher and useful as a pastor. But self-conceit and the love of display made him alike forget his pupils in the school-room, and his Master in the pulpit, in the restless desire to show off Dr. Firkins himself. They seduced him into aberrations in private life, and exposed him to mortifications which even Dr. Firkins, such as he was, might well have avoided. Wisely and truly hath it been said, that humility is the deep and solid foundation of all excellence. It is humility alone which gives the right direction to talents, which adds grace and permanence to every other virtue, dignity to learning, and lustre to genius. END OF VOL. II. LONDON IBOTSON AND PALMER, PRINTERS, SAVOY STREET, STRAND. |