the world, having scarcely time to settle his affairs.
The young lord—but here, kind reader, let us both give a sigh to the memory of Lord Hazard, and admire that the wisest designs in this sublunary existence are liable, like a grain of sand, to be scattered at the will of providence!


THE young lord—for we shall have no occasion for the rest of the family—saw himself his own master at a very early period of life; a circumstance which, together with dissipated company at the university, and a profligate tutor, contributed to form in him the strongest principles of debauchery and libertinism.
When he became of age, his licentiousness made him the terror of the neighbourhood. It is true he was a little checked in his wild career by the wise and wholesome counsels of his mother, to which he at first affected to listen; but, becoming more and more hardened, her precepts and conduct were altogether disregarded; till at length, worn out with preaching to no purpose, she retired into the bosom of her own family, with a firm determination to consider herself entirely alienated from her disgracious son.

Lord Hazard being now left to the unbridled influence of his headstrong passions, stopt at nothing to gratify them. The farmers' wives and daughters, if they had the smallest pretensions to beauty, were sure to become objects first of his generosity, then his gratification, and afterwards his neglect: or, if they durst dispute his impetuous wishes, his unalterable resentment. But, as the swiftest cannon ball, which neither edifices of wood nor stone can oppose, may be stopt in its very strongest velocity by the dull resistance of a wool pack, so were the vehement pursuits of Lord Hazard effectually checked by that dullest of all dull things, according to the bachelors—ay, and many of the married men too—a wife.
My lord's tutor, whose name was Viney, and who, as I hinted before, had the highest ascendancy over his pupil—having ever been cnofiderably more useful to him in the conduct of his love affairs than in his study of the classics—had also another pupil. Indeed his attention to this last mentioned scholar, on whom he had expended a large part of that money which the bounty to Lord Hazard—for his lordship was liberal to excess—had lavished on him, would appear very enigmatical did we not derive it from its natural motive.

This scholar then was no other than his sister, who, without a penny, had married an Irish fortune hunter, and was very shortly saved the trouble of breaking his heart by a kind friend of his, who killed him in a duel