His intelligence was
flattering. An old uncle of mine, who had worn out all that was human
about him in amassing fifty thousand pounds, and finally died of
starving himself, had expired with the pen in his hand, in the very act
of leaving his thousands to pay the national debt. But fate, propitious
to me, had dried up his ink-bottle; the expense of replenishing it would
have broken his heart of itself; and the attorney's announcement to me
was, that the will, after blinding the solicitor to the treasury and
three of his clerks, was pronounced to be altogether illegible.
The fact that I was the nearest of kin got into the newspapers; and in
my first drive down St. James's, I had the pleasure of discovering that
I had cured a vast number of my friends of their calamitous defect of
vision. But if the "post equitem sedet atra cura" was the maxim in the
days of Augustus, the man who drives the slower cabriolet in the days of
George the Fourth, cannot expect to escape. The "hour too many" overtook
me in the first week. On one memorable evening I saw it coming, just as
I turned the corner of Piccadilly; fair flight was hopeless, and I took
refuge in that snug asylum on the right hand of St.
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