if a transmitted education of some generations is necessary for the
due enjoyment of great wealth. Adversity, if a man is set down to it
by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than
any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime. Nevertheless a
certain kind of good fortune generally attends self-made men to the
last. It is their children of the first, or first and second,
generation who are in greater danger, for the race can no more
repeat its most successful performances suddenly and without its
ebbings and flowings of success than the individual can do so, and the
more brilliant the success in any one generation, the greater as a
general rule the subsequent exhaustion until time has been allowed for
recovery. Hence it often happens that the grandson of a successful man
will be more successful than the son- the spirit that actuated the
grandfather having lain fallow in the son and being refreshed by
repose so as to be ready for fresh exertion in the grandson. A very
successful man, moreover, has something of the hybrid in him; he is
a new animal, arising from the coming together of many unfamiliar
elements and it is well known that the reproduction of abnormal
growths, whether animal or vegetable, is irregular and not to be
depended upon, even when they are not absolutely sterile.

  And certainly Mr. Pontifex's success was exceedingly rapid. Only a
few years after he had become a partner his uncle and aunt both died
within a few months of one another. It was then found that they had
made him their heir. He was thus not only sole partner in the
business, but found himself with a fortune of some L30,000 into the
bargain, and this was a large sum in those days. Money came pouring in
upon him, and the faster it came the fonder he became of it, though,
as he frequently said, he valued it not for his own sake, but only
as a means of providing for his dear children.

  Yet when a man is very fond of his money it is not easy for him at
all times to be very fond of his children also. The two are like God
and Mammon. Lord Macaulay has a passage in which he contrasts the
pleasures which a man may derive from books with the inconveniences to
which he may be put by his acquaintances. "Plato," he says, "is
never sullen. Cervantes is never petulant. Demosthenes never comes
unseasonably. Dante never stays too long. No difference of political
opinion can alienate Cicero. No heresy can excite the horror of
Bossuet." I daresay I might differ from Lord Macaulay in my estimate
of some of the writers he has named, but there can be no disputing his
main proposition, namely, that we need have no more trouble from any
of them than we have a mind to, whereas our friends are not always
so easily disposed of. George Pontifex felt this as regards his
children and his money. His money was never naughty; his money never
made noise or litter, and did not spill things on the tablecloth at
meal times, or leave the door open when it went out. His dividends did
not quarrel among themselves, nor was he under any uneasiness lest his
mortgages should become extravagant on reaching manhood and run him up
debts which sooner or later he should have to pay. There were
tendencies in John which made him very uneasy, and Theobald, his
second son, was idle and at times far from truthful. His children
might, perhaps, have answered, had they known what was in their
father's mind, that he did not knock his money about as he not
infrequently knocked his children. He never dealt hastily or pettishly
with his money, and that was perhaps why he and it got on so well
together.

  It must be remembered that at the beginning of the nineteenth
century the relations between parents and children were still far from
satisfactory. The violent type of father, as described by Fielding,
Richardson, Smollett, and Sheridan, is now hardly more likely to
find a place in literature than the original advertisement of
Messrs. Fairlie & Pontifex's "Pious Country Parishioner," but the type
was much too persistent not to have been drawn from nature closely.
The parents in Miss Austen's novels are less like savage wild beasts
than those of her predecessors, but she evidently looks upon them with
suspicion, and an uneasy feeling that le pere de famille est capable
de tout makes itself sufficiently apparent throughout the greater part
of her writings. In the Elizabethan time the relations between parents
and children seem on the whole to have been more kindly. The fathers
and the sons are for the most part friends in Shakespeare, nor does
the evil appear to have reached its full abomination till a long
course of Puritanism had familiarised men's minds with Jewish ideals
as those which we should endeavour to reproduce in our everyday
life. What precedents did not Abraham, Jephthah and Jonadab the son of
Rechab offer? How easy was it to quote and follow them in an age
when few reasonable men or women doubted that every syllable of the
Old Testament was taken down verbatim from the mouth of God. Moreover,
Puritanism restricted natural pleasures; it substituted the Jeremiad
for the Paean, and it forgot that the poor abuses of all times want
countenance.

  Mr. Pontifex may have been a little sterner with his children than
some of his neighbours, but not much. He thrashed his boys two or
three times a week and some weeks a good deal oftener, but in those
days fathers were always thrashing their boys. It is easy to have
juster views when everyone else has them, but fortunately or
unfortunately results have nothing whatever to do with the moral guilt
or blamelessness of him who brings them about; they depend solely upon
the thing done, whatever it may happen to be. The moral guilt or
blamelessness in like manner has nothing to do with the result; it
turns upon the question whether a sufficient number of reasonable
people placed as the actor was placed would have done as the actor has
done. At that time it was universally admitted that to spare the rod
was to spoil the child, and St. Paul had placed disobedience to
parents in very ugly company. If his children did anything which Mr.
Pontifex disliked they were clearly disobedient to their father. In
this case there was obviously only one course for a sensible man to
take. It consisted in checking the first signs of self-will while