ABSTRACT
‘My father died when I was so young as not to be sensible of his loss. As his private fortune was very small, though he had a large income from a very lucrative place that he held in one of the offices under government, his death obliged my mother to make a great retrenchment in her manner of living. Nevertheless, she spared no expence in my education – a measure not so impracticable with a circumscribed fortune then as it is at present, when the charge of keeping a lad at a public school, and afterwards at the university, / is equal to the expenditure of a genteel family in moderate circumstances.
