The
proprietor of the borough, a good humoured sporting extravagant, has
been compelled to yield his influence in St. Stephen's to old Gradus,
that he may preserve his character at Newmarket, and continue his pack
and fox-hunting festivities at home. The representation of the place is
now disposed of to the best bidder, but the ambition of the father has
long since determined upon sending his son (when of age)
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into parliament--a promising candidate for the "loaves and fishes."
Richard Gradus, M.P.--you may almost perceive the senatorial honor
stamped upon the brow of the young aspirant; he has been early initiated
into the value of time and money; his lessons of thrift have been
practically illustrated by watching the operations of the law in his
father's office; his application to learning is not the result of an
innate love of literature, or the ambition of excelling his compeers,
but a cold, stiff, and formal desire to collect together materials
for the storehouse of his memory, that will enable him to pursue his
interested views and future operations on society with every prospect
of success. Genius has no participation in his studies: his knowledge
of Greek and Latin is grammatical and pedantic; he reads Livy, Tacitus,
Sallust, Caesar, Xenophon, Thucydides, in their original language;
boasts of his learning with a haughty mien and scornful look of
self-importance, and thinks this school-boy exercise of memory, this
mechanism of the mind, is to determine the line between genius and
stupidity; and has never taken into consideration that the mere
linguist, destitute of native powers, with his absurd parade of
scholastic knowledge, is a solitary barren plant, when opposed to the
higher occupations of the mind, to the flights of fancy, the daring
combinations of genius, and the sublime pictures of imagination.
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