My mother soon followed him to the land that lies beyond the grave; and thus in infancy I was left, as the phrase is, to the tender mercies of the world in general, and my old bruin of a grandfather in particular.
Yet this upright Sir Basil, who was so indignant at his son's penniless marriage, had been in youth one of the wildest rakes of his time. He had squandered vast sums on the lovely Lavinia Fenton—the original Polly Peachum—and other fair dames, her contemporaries; indeed, it was current in every green-room in London, that he would have run off with this beautiful actress, had he not been anticipated, as all the world knows, or ought to know, by his grace the Duke of Bolton, who made her his wife.
Sir Basil had been wont to drink his three bottles daily, as he said, "without a hair of his coat being turned." He had paraded three of his best friends, on three different occasions, for over-night insults of which he had a very vague recollection in the morning; but then "after what had occurred," what else could he do? and so after bathing his head and right arm in vinegar to make his aim steady, he winged them all at Wimbledon Common, or the back of Montagu House.
In London he was the terror of the watch, and would smash all the lamps in Pall Mall or elsewhere, when, after losing perhaps a thousand guineas at White's among blacklegs and bullies, or after carrying the sedan of some berouged fair one through the streets with links flaring before it, he came reeling home, probably with a broken sword in one hand, a bottle in the other, and his pockets stuffed with brass knockers and other men's wigs; consequently Sir Basil should have remembered the days of his youth, and have tempered the acts of his old age with mercy; but it was otherwise.
I do not mean to detain the reader by a long history of my earlier years; for if those of a Cæsar or an Alexander have but little in them to excite interest, still less must the boyhood of one who began the world as a simple dragoon in the king's service.
The good minister of Netherwood, and the English rector on the south side of the Border, frequently besought Sir Basil to be merciful to the orphan child of his eldest son.
"I pray you to recollect, Sir Basil," urged the rosy-faced rector, "that your own marriage was a love-match."
"It must have been so, if all you scandalous fellows at Oxford said truth."
"Why?"
"For there you said I loved the whole female sex."