Autobiographical Sketches | Page 8

from receiving an impression as of some higher rank
than did really belong to my family. And this impression might seem to
have been designedly insinuated by myself.
My father was a merchant; not in the sense of Scotland, where it means
a retail dealer, one, for instance, who sells groceries in a cellar, but in
the English sense, a sense rigorously exclusive; that is, he was a man
engaged in foreign commerce, and no other; therefore, in wholesale
commerce, and no other--which last limitation of the idea is important,
because it brings him within the benefit of Cicero's condescending
distinction [2] as one who ought to be despised certainly, but not too
intensely to be despised even by a Roman senator. He--this imperfectly
despicable man--died at an early age, and very soon after the incidents
recorded in this chapter, leaving to his family, then consisting of a wife
and six children, an unburdened estate producing exactly sixteen

hundred pounds a year. Naturally, therefore, at the date of my
narrative,--whilst he was still living,--he had an income very much
larger, from the addition of current commercial profits. Now, to any
man who is acquainted with commercial life as it exists in England, it
will readily occur that in an opulent English family of that
class--opulent, though not emphatically rich in a mercantile
estimate--the domestic economy is pretty sure to move upon a scale of
liberality altogether unknown amongst the corresponding orders in
foreign nations. The establishment of servants, for instance, in such
houses, measured even numerically against those establishments in
other nations, would somewhat surprise the foreign appraiser, simply as
interpreting the relative station in society occupied by the English
merchant. But this same establishment, when measured by the quality
and amount of the provision made for its comfort and even elegant
accommodation, would fill him with twofold astonishment, as
interpreting equally the social valuation of the English merchant, and
also the social valuation of the English servant; for, in the truest sense,
England is the paradise of household servants. Liberal housekeeping, in
fact, as extending itself to the meanest servants, and the disdain of petty
parsimonies, are peculiar to England. And in this respect the families of
English merchants, as a class, far outrun the scale of expenditure
prevalent, not only amongst the corresponding bodies of continental
nations, but even amongst the poorer sections of our own
nobility--though confessedly the most splendid in Europe; a fact which,
since the period of my infancy, I have had many personal opportunities
for verifying both in England and in Ireland. From this peculiar
anomaly, affecting the domestic economy of English merchants, there
arises a disturbance upon the usual scale for measuring the relations of
rank. The equation, so to speak, between rank and the ordinary
expressions of rank, which usually runs parallel to the graduations of
expenditure, is here interrupted and confounded, so that one rank would
be collected from the name of the occupation, and another rank, much
higher, from the splendor of the domestic _ménage_. I warn the reader,
therefore, (or, rather, my explanation has already warned him,) that he
is not to infer, from any casual indications of luxury or elegance, a
corresponding elevation of rank.

We, the children of the house, stood, in fact, upon the very happiest tier
in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of
Agur--"Give me neither poverty nor riches"--was realized for us. That
blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low. High enough we
were to see models of good manners, of self-respect, and of simple
dignity; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. Amply
furnished with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with extra means of
health, of intellectual culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the other
hand, we knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed by the
consciousness of privations too sordid, not tempted into restlessness by
the consciousness of privileges too aspiring, we had no motives for
shame, we had none for pride. Grateful also to this hour I am, that,
amidst luxuries in all things else, we were trained to a Spartan
simplicity of diet--that we fared, in fact, very much less sumptuously
than the servants. And if (after the model of the Emperor Marcus
Aurelius) I should return thanks to Providence for all the separate
blessings of my early situation, these four I would single out as worthy
of special commemoration--that I lived in a rustic solitude; that this
solitude was in England; that my infant feelings were moulded by the
gentlest of sisters, and not by horrid, pugilistic brothers; finally, that I
and they were dutiful and loving members of a pure, holy, and
magnificent church.
* * * * *
The earliest incidents in my life, which left stings in