ABSTRACT
The nobleman who had arrived so unexpectedly at Ravensdale, was the Viscount Squander eld, the very Lord who had been so assiduous in his attentions upon Lady Cecilia when she was with her aunt in London, and with whose attentions her ladyship did not seem to be at all attered. He was, however, very high in the graces of Lady Elizabeth Belmont, by whom a title and the manners of a man of fashion were considered as rst-rate accomplishments, and su cient to atone for the want of most others. Her ladyship had observed with pleasure that her niece seemed to have made an impression on this noble lord when she had been in London, and did not conceive it possible but his addresses must be highly agreeable, not only to Lady Cecilia, but also to her father and the rest of the family; she had therefore furnished his/ lordship with the warmest recommendations to her brother, the Earl of Ravensdale, magnifying, or rather creating his virtues and endowments, among which she reckoned as not the least an estate of near 20,000l. a year; and indeed if she could have made good this last character she had given of his lordship, I doubt not but many others would have acquiesced in the opinion that it was a quali cation and endowment of a most exalted kind. But whatever his lordship’s estate might have been when he took possession of it, which was hardly four years before this time, it is certain that it was now diminished pretty nearly in the same proportion, and that hardly a fourth part of it remained. We must not therefore give his lordship entire credit for that discerning eye with which he so soon discovered the uncommon merits of the charming Cecilia, nor for that ardour of a ection which had now borne him across the sea in pursuit of this beloved object. e truth is, the supreme object of his lordship’s regard/ he wisely chose to keep so near himself, that he need never quit his own room to pursue it any where; and it is a question whether all the mental or corporeal perfections of Lady Cecilia would have been able to raise him out of his arm chair, had they not been connected with other endowments of a more solid and weighty nature, and which were of the highest value in his lordship’s eyes. We are therefore so far from admiring his lordship’s discernment in his selection of Lady Cecilia, that we are rather disposed to wonder at his want of it, did not the experience of every day convince us that self-love is able to absorb all other passions, and to shed so dark a
mist upon the understanding as to render it impervious to the rays of even truth itself. Had this lord contemplated himself in any other glass than that of pride, he never could have presumed to li his thoughts to such a character as Lady Cecilia. Nursed up under the doting care of a fond and foolish mother, to whom he was an only child, he/ was ten years old before he knew his letters; and all the learning he had since acquired was little more than to spell them and put them together. He was an adept, however, at cards; which did him this service, that it was his desire to study Hoyle40 that prevailed upon him ever to read at all. But for this knowledge he had paid most dearly, and with a greater sum than probably educated and maintained Sir Isaac Newton through the whole course of his long and glorious life. Nor was the person of this nobleman more apt to inspire a ection than his abilities were to create esteem. Tall and wan, he resembled those exotic plants which spindle up in our hot-houses, where they put forth some sickly blossoms, but which wither and drop o the instant they are exposed to the natural atmosphere. Weak as his constitution was by nature, it was rendered still more so by an early initiation into all the vices of the metropolis, and by that wearisome pursuit of dissipated pleasure which is the epidemic fever of the/ times, and the consequences of which are so fatally visible from the highest even to the lowest orders of society. His rank, however, entitled him to a polite reception any where; and at Ravensdale he would have been sure of this, even though he had no such pretensions to it.
