"
"All the _prejudice of education_" said D'Almaine, good-humouredly; "my
old uncle, the banker, to whose bounty we are both much indebted, my
dear, early inculcated these notions of thrift into the brain of a
certain lighthearted young gentleman, whose buoyant spirits sometimes
led him a little beyond the _barrier of prudence_, and too often left
him environed with difficulties in the _marshes of impediment_. 'Look
before you leap,' was a wise saw of the old gentleman's; and 'be just
before you're generous,' a proverb that never failed to accompany a
temporary supply, or an additional demand upon his generosity."--"Hang
your old uncle!" replied Lady Mary, pouting and trying to look
ill-tempered in the face of Lord Henry's good-natured remonstrance,--"I
never ask a favour for myself, or solicit you to take the recreation
necessary to your own health and that of your family, but I am pestered
with the revised musty maxims of your dead old uncle. He has been
consigned to the earth these ten years, and ~288~~if it were not for the
ten thousand per annum he left us, ought long since to have shared the
fate of his ancestry, whose names were never heard more of than the
tributary tablet imparts to the eye of curiosity in a country church,
and within whose limits all inquiry ends.
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