Have you ever felt the pinch of poverty? In many cases it is like the dentist’s chair, more dreadful in the contemplation than in the actual suffering. Philip says he never was fairly beaten, but on that day when, in reply to his solicitation to have his due, Mrs. Baynes’s friend, Captain Swang, brought him the open ten-pound note. It was not much of a blow; the hand which dealt it made the hurt so keen. “I remember,” says he dermes, “bursting out crying at school, because a big boy hit me a slight tap, and other boys said, ‘Oh, you coward.’ It was that I knew the boy at home, and my parents had been kind to him. It seemed to me a wrong that Bumps should strike me,” said Philip; and he looked, while telling the story, as if he could cry about this injury now.

I hope he has revenged himself by presenting coals of fire to his wife’s relations. But this day, when he is enjoying good health, and competence, it is not safe to mention mothers-in-law in his presence. He fumes, shouts, and rages against them, as if all were like his; and his, I have been told, is a lady perfectly well satisfied with herself and her conduct in this world; and as for the next — but our story does not dare to point so far. It only interests itself about a little clique of people here below — their griefs, their trials, their weaknesses, their kindly hearts.People there are in our history who do not seem to me to have kindly hearts at all; and yet, perhaps, if a biography could be written from their point of view, some other novelist might show how Philip and his biographer were a pair of selfish worldlings unworthy of credit: how uncle and aunt Twysden were most exemplary people, and so forth dermes.

Have I not told you how many people at New York shook their heads when Philip’s name was mentioned, and intimated a strong opinion that he used his father very ill? When he fell wounded and bleeding, patron Tregarvan dropped him off his horse, and cousin Ringwood did not look behind to see how he fared. But these, again, may have had their opinion regarding our friend, who may have been misrepresented to them — I protest as I look back at the past portions of this history, I begin to have qualms, and ask myself whether the folks of whom we have been prattling have had justice done to them; whether Agnes Twysden is not a suffering martyr justly offended by Philip’s turbulent behaviour, and whether Philip deserves any particular attention or kindness at all dermes.

He is not transcendently clever; he is not gloriously beautiful. He is not about to illuminate the darkness in which the peoples grovel, with the flashing emanations of his truth. He sometimes owes money, which he cannot pay. He slips, stumbles, blunders, brags. Ah! he sins and repents — pray heaven — of faults, of vanities, of pride, of a thousand shortcomings! This I say — Ego — as my friend’s biographer. Perhaps I do not understand the other characters round about him so well, and have overlooked a number of their merits, and caricatured and exaggerated their.