the births, deaths, and marriages of great men and women; and I could muster up a long catalogue of them, from the lady who made so handsome a deluge as to swallow up all Asia, to Tom Thumb—which is a pretty touch of the bathos—who was swallowed up by a cow; but that it would insensibly draw me into an imitation of certain authors, who are fonder of shewing their reading than their good manners.
I shall be forgiven however, since a great man and a prodigy are almost synonimous terms, if I lament that nature did not go a single step out of her road to introduce our hero: neither his father nor his mother having dreamt any thing prodigious on the occasion.
Viney indeed had a confused idea in a dream of a basilisk which kept continually in his way, and the nurse, as she nodded by the fire side while Lady Hazard was in labour, dreamt that her young master—

for she always said it would be a boy—spoke the moment he came into the world, and that he believed any thing you said to him; which she sagaciously interpreted as a sure sign that he would be very learned, and very much imposed upon:—the truth of which observation the reader may perhaps have occasion to admire before he and I part.
Lady Hazard's being brought to bed of a son, to the great joy of that honourable family, seems then to be the event I hinted at in the third chapter. It really took place about a twelve month after the marriage, and three years and a quarter—for I love to be exact—after the birth of the first son, whom Lord Hazard called Zekiel, after his grandfather, and this, our hero, Charles, after himself.
The happiness of Lord Hazard would now have been complete, had it not been imbittered by a consideration that the whole estate being willed away with the title, he could not do his youngest son the justice he wished. To amend, however, this deficiency, he resolved to make him a paragon of learning; and, as he knew very well that had not the former part of his own life been devoted to idleness, it would have been less given to dissipation, he resolved to add a complete study of the arts to his son's education.

In the contemplation of this plan he took great delight. At length, when Zekiel had attained his eleventh year, he was sent to Eaton school, to leave the coast clear for a proper attention to the education of Charles, which his lordship was determined to superintend himself.
Many essays were made upon his tender