In those letters, of which I have kept memorandums, I gave you an account of my brother’s and sister’s antipathy to Mr. Lovelace; and the methods they took (so far as they had then come to my knowledge) to ruin him in the opinion of my other friends. And I told you, that after a very cold, yet not a directly affrontive behaviour to him, they all of a sudden9 became more violent, and proceeded to personal insults; which brought on at last the unhappy rencounter between my brother and him.
Now you must know, that from the last conversation that passed between my aunt and me, it comes out, that this sudden vehemence on my brother’s and sister’s parts, was owing to stronger reasons than to the college-begun antipathy on his side, or to slighted love on hers; to wit, to an apprehension that my uncles intended to follow my grandfather’s example in my favour; at least in a higher degree than they wish they should. An apprehension founded it seems on a conversation between my two uncles and my brother and sister: which my aunt communicated to me in confidence, as an argument to prevail upon me to accept of Mr. Solmes’s noble settlements: urging, that such a seasonable compliance, would frustrate my brother’s and sister’s views, and establish me forever in the love of my father and uncles.
I will give you the substance of this communicated conversation, after I have made a brief introductory observation or two, which however I hardly need to make to you who are so well acquainted with us all, did not the series or thread of the story require it.
I have more than once mentioned to you the darling view some of us have long had of raising a family
, as it is called. A reflection, as I have often thought, upon our own, which is no considerable or upstart one, on either side, on my mother’s especially.—A view too frequently it seems entertained by families which, having great substance, cannot be satisfied without rank and title.
My uncles had once extended this view to each of us three children; urging, that as they themselves intended not to marry, we each of us might be so portioned, and so advantageously matched, as that our posterity, if not ourselves, might make a first figure in our country.—While my brother, as the only son, thought the two girls might be very well provided for by ten or fifteen thousand pounds apiece: and that all the real estates in the family, to wit, my grandfather’s, father’s, and two uncles’, and the remainder of their respective personal estates, together with what he had an expectation of from his godmother, would make such a noble fortune, and give him such an interest, as might entitle him to hope for a peerage. Nothing less would satisfy his ambition.
With this view he gave himself airs very early; “That his grandfather and uncles were his stewards: that no man ever had better: that daughters were but incumbrances and drawbacks upon a family:” and this low and familiar expression was often in his mouth, and uttered always with the self-complaisance which an imagined happy thought can be supposed to give the speaker; to wit, “That a man who has sons brings up chickens for his own table,” (though once I made his comparison stagger with him, by asking him, If the sons, to make it hold, were to have their necks wrung off?) “whereas daughters are chickens brought up for tables of other men.” This, accompanied with the equally polite reflection, “That, to induce people to take them off their hands, the family-stock must be impaired into the bargain,” used to put my sister out of all patience: and, although she now seems to think a younger sister only can be an incumbrance, she was then often proposing to me to make a party in our own favour against my brother’s rapacious views
, as she used to call them: while I was for considering the liberties he took of this sort, as the effect of a temporary pleasantry, which, in a young man, not naturally good-humoured, I was glad to see; or as a foible that deserved raillery, but no other notice.
But when my grandfather’s will (of the purport of which in my particular favour, until it was opened, I was as ignorant as they) had lopped off one branch of my brother’s expectation, he was extremely dissatisfied with me. Nobody indeed was pleased: for although everyone loved me, yet being the youngest child, father, uncles, brother, sister, all thought themselves postponed, as to matter of right and power (Who loves not power?): And my father himself could not bear that I should be made sole, as I may call it, and independent; for such the will, as to that estate and the powers it gave, (unaccountably, as they all said), made me.
To obviate, therefore, everyone’s jealousy, I gave up to my father’s management, as you know, not only the estate, but the money bequeathed me (which was a moiety of what my grandfather had by him at his death; the other moiety being bequeathed to my sister); contenting myself to take as from his bounty what he was pleased to allow me, without desiring the least addition to my annual stipend. And then I hoped I had laid all envy asleep: but still my brother and sister (jealous, as now is evident, of my two uncles’ favour of me, and of the pleasure I had given my father and them by this act of duty) were every now-and-then occasionally doing me covert ill offices: of which, however, I took the less notice, when I was told of them, as I
