after sowing his wild •ats, sir Thomas would turn out A Man of the World.


THOUGH such a man as we have described might be reckoned a valuable acquaintance by many, he was otherwise reckoned by Annesly; he had heard enough (though he had heard but part) of his character, to consider him as a dangerous neighbour; but it was impossible to avoid sometimes seeing him, from whose father he had got the living which he now occupied. There is no tax so heavy on a little man, as an acquaintance with a great one. Annesly had found this in the life-time of Sir William Sindall. He was one of those whom the general voice pronounces to be a good sort of man, under which denomination I never look for much sense, or much delicacy.
In fact the baronet possessed but little of either; he lived hospitably for his own sake, as well as that of his guests, because he liked a good dinner and a bottle of wine after it; and in one part of hospitality he excelled, which was, the faculty of making every body drunk that had not uncommon fortitude to withstand his attacks. Annesly's cloth protected him from this last inconvenience; but it often drew from Sir William a set of jests, which his memory had enabled him to retain, and had passed through the heirs of his family, like their estate, down from the days of that monarch of facetious memory, Charles the Second.
Though to a man of Annesly's delicacy all this could not but be highly disagreeable, yet gratitude made him Sir William's guest often enough to show that he had not forgot that attention which his past favours demanded; and Sir William recollected them from another motive, to wit, that they gave a sanction to those liberties he sometimes used with him who had received them.
This might have been held sufficient to have cancelled the obligation; but Annesly was not wont to be directed by the easiest rules of virtue; the impression still remained, and it even descended to the son after the death of the father.
Sindall therefore was a frequent guest at his house; and, though it might have been imagined, that the dissipated mind of a young man of his fortune would have found but little delight in Annesly's humble shed, yet he seemed to enjoy its simplicity with the highest relish; he possessed indeed that pliancy of disposition that could wonderfully accommodate himself to the humour of every one around him; and he so managed matters in his visits to Annesly, that this last began to imagine the reports he had