'Squire Bluster is descended from an ancient family. The estate which his ancestors immemoriably possessed was much augmented by Captain Bluster, who served under Drake in the reign of Elizabeth; and the Blusters, who were before only petty gentlemen, have from that time frequently represented the shire in parliament, being chosen to present addresses and give laws at hunting-matches and races. They were eminently hospitable and popular till the father of this gentleman died of an election. His lady went to the grave soon after him, and left their heir, then only ten years old, to the care of his grandmother, who would not suffer him to be controlled, because she could not bear to hear him cry; and never sent him to school, because she was not able to live without his company. She taught him, however, very early to inspect the steward's accounts, to dog the butler from the cellar, and catch the servants at a junket; so that he was at the age of eighteen a complete master of all the lower arts of domestic policy, and had often on the road detected combinations between the coachman and the ostler.
'Money, in whatever hands, will confer power. Distress will fly to immediate refuge, without much consideration of remote consequences. Bluster had, therefore, on coming of age, a despotic authority in many families, whom he had assisted, on pressing occasions, with larger sums than they can easily repay. The only visits that he makes are to those houses of misfortune, where he enters with the insolence of absolute command, enjoys the terrors of the family, exacts their obedience, riots at their charge, and in the height of his joys insults the father with menaces and the daughters with scurrilities.
'Such is the life of Squire Bluster; a man in whose power Fortune has liberally placed the means of happiness, but who has defeated all her gifts of their end by the depravity of his mind. He is wealthy without followers; he is magnificent without witnesses; he hath birth without alliance, and influence without dignity. His neighbours scorn him as a brute; his dependants dread him as an oppressor; and he has only the gloomy comfort of reflecting that if he is hated he is likewise feared.'
The 'Rambler.'—Vol. III. No. 153.
Turba Remi sequitur fortunam, ut semper, et odit
Damnatos.—Juv.
The fickle crowd with fortune comes and goes;
Wealth still finds followers, and misfortune foes.
The writer, who had been adopted by a rich nabob lately returned from the Indies, suddenly found himself deprived of the fortune which it was anticipated would have fallen to his share; his patron having died without making a will in his protégé's favour, and thus a fine estate had gone to another branch of the family.
'It was now my part,' writes the victim of this unexpected adversity, 'to consider how I should repair the disappointment. I could not but triumph in my long list of friends, which composed almost every name that power or knowledge entitled to eminence, and in the prospect of the innumerable roads to honour and preferment which I had laid open to myself by the wise use of temporary riches. I believed nothing necessary but that I should continue that acquaintance to which I had been so readily admitted, and which had hitherto been cultivated on both sides with equal ardour.