s), elastic on the muscles of the calf and foot, bearing his
broad iron-grey head in grand elevation. The hard labour of the day approved the
cooling exercise and the crowning refreshments of French cookery and wines of
known vintages. He was happy at that hour in dispensing wisdom or nugae to his
hearers, like the Western sun, whose habit it is, when he is fairly treated, to
break out in quiet splendours, which by no means exhaust his treasury. Blest
indeed above his fellows, by the height of the bow-winged bird in a fair weather
sunset sky above the pecking sparrow, is he that ever in the recurrent evening
of his day sees the best of it ahead and soon to come. He has the rich reward of
a youth and manhood of virtuous living. Dr. Middleton misdoubted the future as
well as the past of the man who did not, in becoming gravity, exult to dine.
That man he deemed unfit for this world and the next.
    An example of the good fruit of temperance, he had a comfortable pride in
his digestion, and his political sentiments were attuned by his veneration of
the Powers rewarding virtue. We must have a stable world where this is to be
done.
    The Rev. Doctor was a fine old picture; a specimen of art peculiarly
English; combining in himself piety and epicurism, learning and gentlemanliness,
with good room for each and a seat at one another's table: for the rest, a
strong man, an athlete in his youth, a keen reader of facts and no reader of
persons, genial, a giant at a task, a steady worker besides, but easily
discomposed. He loved his daughter and he feared her. However much he liked her
character, the dread of her sex and age was constantly present to warn him that
he was not tied to perfect sanity while the damsel Clara remained unmarried. Her
mother had been an amiable woman, of the poetical temperament nevertheless, too
enthusiastic, imaginative, impulsive, for the repose of a sober scholar; an
admirable woman, still, as you see, a woman, a firework. The girl resembled her.
Why should she wish to run away from Patterne Hall for a single hour? Simply
because she was of the sex born mutable and explosive. A husband was her proper
custodian, justly relieving a father. With demagogues abroad and daughters at
home, philosophy is needed for us to keep erect. Let the girl be Cicero's
Tullia: well, she dies! The choicest of them will furnish us examples of a
strange perversity
