 most injured son
                                                                PEREGRINE PICKLE
 
This letter, which nothing but his passion and inexperience could excuse, had
such an effect upon his mother, as may be easily conceived. She was enraged to a
degree of frenzy against the writer; though at the same time she considered the
whole as the production of Mrs. Trunnion's particular pique, and represented it
to her husband as an insult, that he was bound in honour to resent, by breaking
off all correspondence with the commodore and his family. This was a bitter pill
to Gamaliel, who, through a long course of years, was so habituated to
Trunnion's company, that he could as easily have parted with a limb, as have
relinquished the club all at once. He therefore ventured to represent his own
incapacity to follow her advice, and begged that he might at least be allowed to
drop the connexion gradually; protesting that he would do his endeavour to give
her all manner of satisfaction.
    Mean while preparations were made for Peregrine's departure to the
university, and in a few weeks he set out in the seventeenth year of his age,
accompanied by the same attendants who lived with him at Winchester, after his
uncle had laid strong injunctions upon him to avoid the company of modest women,
to mind his learning, to let him hear of his welfare as often as he could spare
time to write, and had settled his appointments at the rate of five hundred a
year, including his governor's salary, which was one fifth part of the sum. The
heart of our young gentleman dilated at the prospect of the figure he should
make with such an handsome annuity, the management of which was left to his own
discretion; and he amused his imagination with the most agreeable reveries
during his journey to Oxford, which he performed in two days. Here being
introduced to the head of the college, to whom he had been recommended,
accommodated with genteel apartments, entered as gentleman commoner in the
books, and provided with a judicious tutor, instead of returning to the study of
Greek and Latin, in which he thought himself already sufficiently instructed; he
renewed his acquaintance with some of his old school-fellows, whom he found in
the same situation, and was by them initiated in all the fashionable diversions
of the place.
    It was not long before he made himself remarkable for his spirit and humour,
which were so acceptable to the bucks of the university, that he was admitted as
a member of their corporation, and in a very little time became the most
conspicuous personage of the whole fraternity; not that he
