ABSTRACT

Robert Wilson was a market-gardener. Early in life he married a deserving young woman, whom he loved with entire tenderness, and by whom he had several children. No man on earth could be fonder of his little off-spring than Wilson; and they, on the other hand, almost worshipped their father, taking great delight in nothing so much as in doing what he wished. Wilson was not very wise, nor was he at all learned; but his heart, which, as I have said, was full of tenderness, told him, with unerring instinct, that his children would be governed more perfectly, and with more wholesome effect, under the dominion of love, than under that of fear; and his was indeed a happy family where affection, pleasure, obedience, and faith, (faith in each other,) went hand in hand. Wilson was well situated for passing his life comfortably and rationally – his garden being just far enough out of London to render inconvenient his mixing in the squalid profligacies of town (had he been so inclined); and yet he was not so entirely in the country as to harden him into the robust callousness and ignorant vices of village life. He could just hear enough of the “stir of the great Babel,” to interest him in it, and to keep his faculties alive and awake to the value of his own quiet, and to the unaffected caresses of his dear wife and children, which always appeared more and more precious after he had been hearing, in his weekly visits to town, some instance of mercenary hypocrisy and false heartedness.