The Twins | Page 3

she tried on the cap, and looked into many mirrors; but, after
long inspection, decided upon still remaining a wife, because the weeds
were so clearly unbecoming. Habit, meanwhile, and that still-existing
old aunt, who seemed resolved to live to a hundred, kept her as before
at Burleigh: and, seeing that a few months after the captain's departure
she had presented the world, not to say her truant lord, with twins, she
had always found something to do in the way of, what she considered,
education, and other juvenile amusement: that is to say, when the
gayeties of a circle of fifteen miles in radius left her any time to spare
in such a process. The twins--a brace of boys--were born and bred at
Burleigh, and had attained severally to twenty years of age, just before
their father came home again as brevet-major-general. But both they,
and that arrival, deserve special detail, each in its own chapter.
CHAPTER II.
THE HEROES.
MRS. TRACY'S sons were as unlike each other as it is well possible
for two human beings to be, both in person and character. Julian, whose
forward and bold spirit gained him from the very cradle every
prerogative of eldership (and he did struggle first into life, too, so he

was the first-born), had grown to be a swarthy, strong, big-boned man,
of the Roman-nosed, or, more physiognomically, the Jewish cast of
countenance; with melo-dramatic elf-locks, large whiskers, and
ungovernable passions; loud, fierce, impetuous; cunning, too, for all his
overbearing clamour; and an embodied personification of those choice
essentials to criminal happiness--a hard heart and a good digestion.
Charles, on the contrary (or, as logicians would say, on the
contradictory), was fair-haired, blue-eyed, of Grecian features; slim,
though well enough for inches, and had hitherto (as the commonalty
have it) "enjoyed" weak health: he was gentle and affectionate in heart,
pure and religious in mind, studious and unobtrusive in habits. It was a
wonder to see the strange diversity between those own twin-brothers,
born within the same hour, and, it is superfluous to add, of the same
parents; brought up in all outward things alike, and who had shared
equally in all that might be called advantage or disadvantage, of
circumstance or education.
Certain is it that minds are different at birth, and require as different a
treatment as Iceland moss from cactuses, or bull-dogs from bull-finches:
certain is it, too, that Julian, early submitted and resolutely broken in,
would have made as great a man, as Charles, naturally meek, did make
a good one; but for the matter of educating her boys, poor Mrs. Tracy
had no more notion of the feat, than of squaring the circle, or
determining the longitude. She kept them both at home, till the peevish
aunt could suffer Julian's noise no longer: the house was a
Pandemonium, and the giant grown too big for that castle of Otranto;
so he must go at any rate; and (as no difference in the treatment of
different characters ever occurred to any body) of course Charles must
go along with him. Away they went to an expensive school, which
Julian's insubordination on the instant could not brook--and,
accordingly, he ran away; without doubt, Charles must be taken away
too. Another school was tried, Julian got expelled this time; and
Charles, in spite of prizes, must, on system, be removed with him: so
forth, with like wisdom, all through the years of adolescence and
instruction, those ill-matched brothers were driven as a pair. Then again,
for fashion's sake, and Aunt Green's whims, the circumspective mother,
notwithstanding all her inconsistencies, gave each of them prettily

bound hand-books of devotion; which the one used upon his knees, and
the other lit cigars withal; both extremes having exceeded her intention:
and she proved similarly overreached when she persisted in treating
both exactly alike, as to liberal allowances, and liberty of will; the
result being, that one of her sons "foolishly" spent his money in a
multitude of charitable hobbies; and that the other was constantly
supplied with means for (the mother was sorry to say it, vulgar)
dissipation. By consequence, Charles did more good, and Julian more
evil, than I have time to stop and tell off.
If any thing in this life must be personal, peculiar, and specific, it is
education: we take upon ourselves to speak thus dogmatically, not of
mere school-teaching only, musa, _musæ_, and so forth; nor yet of
lectures, on relative qualities of carbon and nitrogen in vegetables; no,
nor even of schemes of theology, or codes of morals; but we do speak
of the daily and hourly reining-in, or letting-out, of discouragement in
one appetite, and encouragement in another; of habitual formation of
characters in their diversity; and of shaping their bear's-cub, or that
child-angel, the