Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. C HIL DHO O D. The Leigh family.?Preposterous charge against it.?Beautiful character in Fielding applied to Mr. Leigh by his son.?Author’s birthplace, Southgate.?Dr. Trinder, clergyman and physician.?Question of sporting.?Character of Izaak Walton.?Cruelty of a cock- fighter.?Calais and infant heresy.?Porpoises and dolphins.?A despotic brother.?Supernatural fears inchildhood.?Anecdote of an oath.?Martial toys.?Infant church-militant.?Manners and customs of the time.?Music and poetry.?Memories of songs.?Authors in vogue.?Pitt and Fox.?Lords and Commons. I Have spoken of the Duke of Chandos, to whose nephew, Mr. Leigh, my father became tutor. Mr. Leigh. who gave me his name, was son of the Juke’s sister, Lady Caroline, and died a member of Parliament for Addlestrope. He was one of the kindest and gentlest of men, addicted to those tastes for poetry and sequestered pleasure, which have been conspicuous in his son, Lord Leigh; for all which reasons it would seem, and contrary to the usurping qualities in such cases made and provided, he and his family were subjected the other day to one of the most extraordinary charges that a defeated claim ever brought drunken witnesses to set up; no less than the murder and burial of a set of masons, who were employed in building a bridge, and whose destruction in the act of so doing was to bury both them and a monument which they knew of, for ever ! To complete the ro- marire of the tragedy, a lady, the wife of the usurper, presides rver the catastrophe. She cries,
Let go, while the ] )or wretches are raising a stone at night-time, amidst a scene of torches and seclusion; and down goes the stone aided by this tremendous father and son, and crushes the victims of her ambition! She meant, as Cowley says Goliah did of Davi…