Fortune surely shifted me from my birth, or first looked on me in a mood
as splenetic as that of nature, when she produced that most sombre and
unpleasing of trees, the olive; to pursue the simile; I may have
conduced to the comfort of others, nay, even to their convenience and
luxury, but it never availed aught to my own appearance or
circumstances; I went on, like that unhappy-looking tree, decaying in
the trunk and blighting in the branches, and yielding up the produce of
a liberal education and an active nature to the public, but reaping for
my own portion only misfortune and disappointment; I had sprung up in
the wilderness of the world, and I was left to grow or wither as I
might; every one was ready to profit by me when a fruitful season
rendered me available to them, but none cared to toil to give me space
for growth, or to enrich the perishing earth at my unlucky root!
I was educated for the church, but my father died while I was at
college, and I lost the curacy, which was in the gift of my uncle,
through the pretty face of a city merchant's daughter, who wrote a
sonnet to my worthy relative on his recovery from a fit of the gout, and
obtained the curacy for her brother in exchange for her effusion. What
was to be done? I offered myself as tutor to a young gentleman who was
to study the classics until he was of age, and then to turn fox-hunter
to supply the place of his deceased father; but I was considered by his
relations to be too good-looking to be domesticated in the house of a
rich widow under fifty, and I had the satisfaction of seeing the vacant
seat in the family coach filled by an old, sandy-haired M.
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