Kenelm Chillingly | Page 3

admission into the Charterhouse
School, at which illustrious academy he obtained no remarkable
distinction. Nevertheless, as soon as he left it the State took him under
its special care, and appointed him to a clerkship in a public office.
From that moment he continued to get on in the world, and was now a
Commissioner of Customs, with a salary of L1500 a year. As soon as
he had been thus enabled to maintain a wife, he selected a wife who
assisted to maintain himself. She was an Irish peer's widow, with a
jointure of L2000 a year.
A few months after his marriage, Chillingly Gordon effected insurances
on his wife's life, so as to secure himself an annuity of L1000 a year in
case of her decease. As she appeared to be a fine healthy woman, some
years younger than her husband, the deduction from his income
effected by the annual payments for the insurance seemed an
over-sacrifice of present enjoyment to future contingencies. The result
bore witness to his reputation for sagacity, as the lady died in the
second year of their wedding, a few months after the birth of her only
child, and of a heart-disease which had been latent to the doctors, but
which, no doubt, Gordon had affectionately discovered before he had
insured a life too valuable not to need some compensation for its loss.
He was now, then, in the possession of L2500 a year, and was therefore
very well off, in the pecuniary sense of the phrase. He had, moreover,
acquired a reputation which gave him a social rank beyond that
accorded to him by a discerning State. He was considered a man of
solid judgment, and his opinion upon all matters, private and public,
carried weight. The opinion itself, critically examined, was not worth
much, but the way he announced it was imposing. Mr. Fox said that 'No
one ever was so wise as Lord Thurlow looked.' Lord Thurlow could not
have looked wiser than Mr. Chillingly Gordon. He had a square jaw
and large red bushy eyebrows, which he lowered down with great

effect when he delivered judgment. He had another advantage for
acquiring grave reputation. He was a very unpleasant man. He could be
rude if you contradicted him; and as few persons wish to provoke
rudeness, so he was seldom contradicted.
Mr. Chillingly Mivers, another cadet of the house, was also
distinguished, but in a different way. He was a bachelor, now about the
age of thirty-five. He was eminent for a supreme well-bred contempt
for everybody and everything. He was the originator and chief
proprietor of a public journal called "The Londoner," which had lately
been set up on that principle of contempt, and we need not say, was
exceedingly popular with those leading members of the community
who admire nobody and believe in nothing. Mr. Chillingly Mivers was
regarded by himself and by others as a man who might have achieved
the highest success in any branch of literature, if he had deigned to
exhibit his talents therein. But he did not so deign, and therefore he had
full right to imply that, if he had written an epic, a drama, a novel, a
history, a metaphysical treatise, Milton, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Hume,
Berkeley would have been nowhere. He held greatly to the dignity of
the anonymous; and even in the journal which he originated nobody
could ever ascertain what he wrote. But, at all events, Mr. Chillingly
Mivers was what Mr. Chillingly Gordon was not; namely, a very clever
man, and by no means an unpleasant one in general society.
The Rev. John Stalworth Chillingly was a decided adherent to the creed
of what is called "muscular Christianity," and a very fine specimen of it
too. A tall stout man with broad shoulders, and that division of lower
limb which intervenes between the knee and the ankle powerfully
developed. He would have knocked down a deist as soon as looked at
him. It is told by the Sieur de Joinville, in his Memoir of Louis, the
sainted king, that an assembly of divines and theologians convened the
Jews of an Oriental city for the purpose of arguing with them on the
truths of Christianity, and a certain knight, who was at that time
crippled, and supporting himself on crutches, asked and obtained
permission to be present at the debate. The Jews flocked to the
summons, when a prelate, selecting a learned rabbi, mildly put to him
the leading question whether he owned the divine conception of our

Lord. "Certainly not," replied the rabbi; whereon the pious knight,
shocked by such blasphemy, uplifted his crutch and felled the rabbi,
and then flung himself among the other misbelievers, whom he soon
dispersed in ignominious flight and in a very belaboured condition.