message; but its meaning was clear, and it was ominous.

Dinner came at last: the table was loaded with awkward profusion; but it was as close an imitation as we could yet contrive of our opulent neighbour's display. No less than four footmen, discharged as splendid superfluities from the household of a duke, waited behind our four chairs, to make their remarks on our style of eating in contrast with the polished performances at their late master's. But Mrs. Molasses had exactly four. The argument was unanswerable. Silence and sullenness reigned through the banquet; but on the retreat of the four gentlemen who did us the honour of attending, the whole tale of evil burst forth. What is the popularity of man? The whole family had already dropped from the highest favouritism into the most angry disrepute. A kind of little rebellion raged against us in the village: we were hated, scorned, and libelled on all sides. My unlucky remittances had done the deed.

The village milliner, a cankered old carle, who had made caps and bonnets for the vicinage during the last forty years, led the battle. The wife and daughters of a man of East Indian wealth were not to be clothed like meaner souls; and the sight of three London bonnets in my pew had set the old sempstress in a blaze. The flame was easily propagated. The builder of my chaise-cart was irritated at the handsome barouche in which my family now moved above the heads of mankind. The rumour that champagne had appeared at the cottage roused the indignation of the honest vintner who had so long supplied me with port: and professional insinuations of the modified nature of this London luxury were employed to set the sneerers of the village against me and mine. Our four footmen had been instantly discovered by the eye of an opulent neighbour; and the competition was at once laughed at as folly, and resented as an insult. Every hour saw some of my old friends falling away from me. An unlucky cold, which seized one of my daughters a week before my return, had cut away my twenty years' acquaintance, the village-doctor, from my cause; for the illness of an "heiress" was not to be cured by less than the first medical authority of the province. The supreme Aesculapius was accordingly called in; and his humbler brother swore, in the bitterness of his soul, that he would never forget the affront on this side of death's door. The inevitable increase of dignity which communicated itself to the manners of my whole household did the rest; and if my wife held her head high, never was pride more peevishly retorted. Like the performers in a pillory, we seemed to have been elevated only for the benefit of a general pelting.

These were the women's share of the mischief; but I was not long without administering in person to our unpopularity. The report of my fortune had, as usual, been enormously exaggerated; and every man who had a debt to pay, or a purchase to make, conceived himself "bound to apply first to his old and excellent friend, to whom the accommodation for a month or two must be such a trifle." If I had listened to a tenth of those compliments, "their old and excellent friend" would have only preceded them to a jail. In some instances I complied, and so far only showed my folly; for who loves his creditor? My refusal of course increased the host of my enemies; and I was pronounced purse-proud, beggarly, and unworthy of the notice of the "true gentlemen, who knew how to spend their money."

Yet, though I was to be thus abandoned by my fox-hunting friends, I was by no means to feel myself the inhabitant of a solitary world. If the sudden discovery of kindred could cheer me under my calamities, no man might have passed a gayer life. For a long succession of years I had not seen a single relative. Not that they altogether disdained even the humble hospitalities of my cottage, or the humble help of my purse; on the contrary, they liked both exceedingly, and would have exhibited their affection in enjoying them as often as I pleased.

But I had early adopted a resolution, which I recommend to all men. I made use of no disguise on the subject of our mutual tendencies. I knew them to be selfish, beggarly in the midst of wealth, and artificial in the fulness of protestation. I disdained to play the farce of civility with them. I neither kissed nor quarrelled with them; but I quietly shut my door, and at last allowed no foot of their generation inside it. They hated me mortally in consequence, and I knew it. I despised them, and I conclude they knew that too. But I was resolved that they should not despise me; and I secured that point by not suffering them to feel that they had made me their dupe. The nabob's will had not soothed their tempers; and I was honoured with their most smiling animosity.

But now, as if they were hidden in the ground like weeds only waiting for the shower, a new and boundless crop of relationship sprang up. Within the first fortnight after my return, I was overwhelmed with congratulations from east, west, north, and south; and every postscript pointed with a request for my interest with boards and public offices of all kinds; with India presidents, treasury secretaries, and colonial patrons, for the provision of sons, nephews, and cousins, to the third and fourth generation.

My positive declarations that I had no influence with ministers were received with resolute scepticism. I was charged with old obligations conferred on my grandfathers and grandmothers; and, finally, had the certain knowledge that my gentlest denials were looked upon as a compound of selfishness and hypocrisy. Before a month was out, I had extended my sources of hostility to three-fourths of the kingdom, and contrived to plant in every corner some individual who looked on himself as bound to say the worst he could of his heartless, purse-proud, and abjured kinsman.

I should have sturdily borne up against all this while I could keep the warfare out of my own county. But what man can abide a daily skirmish round his house? I began to think of retreating while I was yet able to show my head; for, in truth, I was sick of this perpetual belligerency. I loved to see happy human faces. I loved the meeting of those old and humble friends to whose faces, rugged as they were, I was accustomed. I liked to stop and hear the odd news of the village, and the still odder versions of London news that transpired through the lips of our established politicians. I liked an occasional visit to our little club, where the exciseman, of fifty years standing was our oracle in politics; the attorney, of about the same duration, gave us opinions on the drama, philosophy, and poetry, all equally unindebted to Aristotle; and my mild and excellent father-in-law, the curate, shook his silver locks in gentle laughter at the discussion. I loved a supper in my snug parlour with the choice half dozen; a song from my girls, and a bottle after they were gone to dream of bow-knots and bargains for the next day.

But my delights were now all crushed. Another Midas, all I touched had turned to gold; and I believe in my soul that, with his gold, I got credit for his asses' ears.

However, I had long felt that contempt for popular opinion which every man feels who knows of what miserable materials it is made—how much of it is mere absurdity—how much malice—how much more the frothy foolery and maudlin gossip of the empty of this empty generation. "What was it to me if the grown children of our idle community, the male babblers, and the female cutters-up of character, voted me, in their commonplace souls, the blackest of black sheep? I was still strong in the solid respect of a few worth them all."

Let no man smile when I say that, on reckoning up this Theban band of sound judgment and inestimable fidelity, I found my muster reduced to three, and those three of so unromantic a class as the grey-headed exciseman, the equally grey-headed solicitor, and the curate.

But let it be remembered that a man must take his